Gordon Brown puffs the great wind scam

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 26/10/2008
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Even in these dark times, it is still possible to be shocked when our Prime Minister personally endorses a flagrant perversion of the truth. Last year, for example, many of us felt outraged when Gordon Brown pretended that the Lisbon Treaty was somehow totally different from the EU Constitution, in order to wriggle out of his party's manifesto promise of a referendum. Last week Mr Brown in effect did it again when he endorsed the deception at the heart of his Government's wildly exaggerated claims about the benefits of using wind to make electricity.
In a video for the British Wind Energy Association, the industry's chief lobby group, Mr Brown claimed: "We are now getting 3 gigawatts of our electricity capacity from wind power, enough to power more than 1.5 million homes."

This deliberately perpetuates the central confidence trick practised by the wind industry, by confusing "capacity" with the actual amount of electricity wind produces. In fact, as the Government's own figures show, wind turbines generate on average only 27 to 28 per cent, barely a quarter, of their "capacity".
In other words, far from producing those "3 gigawatts", the 2,000 turbines already built actually contributed - again on official figures - an average of only 694 megawatts (MW) last year, less than the output of a single medium-size conventional power station. Far from producing "enough to power more than 1.5 million homes", it is enough to power barely a sixth of that number, representing only 1.3 per cent of all the electricity we use. Yet for this we have already blighted thousands of square miles of countryside, at a cost of billions of pounds.
Indeed, at the same BWEA-sponsored event, Mike O'Brien, energy minister, went on to perpetuate the second confidence trick practised by both Government and industry, which is to conceal the fact that all this is only made possible by the huge hidden subsidy given to wind energy through the Renewables Obligation. This compels electricity companies to pay way over the odds for the power generated by wind turbines, a burden passed on to us all in our electricity bills.
Mr O'Brien claimed that the cost of electricity generated by offshore wind turbines would drop by 8 per cent, failing to explain that it would then be raised by 50 per cent through the hidden subsidy. He then soared even further into make-believe by saying that he was "assessing plans" to build a further 25GW-worth of offshore turbines by 2020, "enough electricity for every home in the country".
Mr O'Brien must know that there is not the remotest chance that we could build the 10,000 monster turbines needed to achieve this, at a rate of more than two a day, when it takes weeks to instal each vast machine. At present, of the giant barges needed for the work, there is only one in the world. Even if it were possible, the construction costs alone, on current figures, would be anything up to £100 billion - the price of 37 nuclear power stations, capable of producing nearly 10 times as much electricity - while the subsidies alone would add £6 billiion a year more, or 25 per cent, to our electricity bills.
Why do our ministers think they can get away with talking such nonsense?
What is humiliating is that they do it largely to appease the EU, which has set us the wholly impossible target of producing 32 per cent of our electricity from "renewables" by 2020. What is dangerous is that even contemplating such a mad waste of resources is diverting attention from the genuine need to build enough proper, grown-up power stations to keep our lights on. For that the time is fast running out, if it hasn't done so already. It is on that Mr Brown should be concentrating, not on trying to pull the wool over our eyes with such infantile deceits.
EU is a persistent offender against itself
WHEN the EU’s leaders agree to ignore the rulings of their own courts that they are acting illegally, who can compel them to obey the law?
That is the extraordinary question which arises from last Thursday’s confirmation by the EU’s Court of First Instance that the EU is acting unlawfully by refusing to lift its ban on the People’s Mujahideen of Iran, the PMOI, the main would-be democratic opposition movement to the ruthless dictatorship of the mullahs in Tehran.
This bizarre saga began in 2001 when the British Government, as part of a deal with Tehran, agreed to ban the PMOI as terrorists, then talked the EU into following suit.
In 2006, the EU court ruled that its ban was unlawful. In 2007, at British instigation, the EU Council of Ministers twice agreed to defy this ruling.
When 35 MPs and peers, including former ministers, asked the High Court to rule on Britain’s action, three judges found that the Government had produced no evidence that the PMOI were terrorists and ordered it to lift the ban.
When this was confirmed by the Lord Chief Justice, who described the ban as “perverse” and “unlawful”, the Government reluctantly obeyed his order, thus bringing itself into conflict with an EU law that the EU court had already ruled as unlawful.
Last July, as acting EU president, France’s President Sarkozy insisted that the EU ban must remain.
Last week, after further protests from EU MPs, MEPs and senior lawyers, the Court of First Instance again ruled the EU’s ban as unlawful.
What makes this serial defiance of the law incomprehensible is that it has been done to appease a regime whose agents are acting as terrorists throughout the Middle East, all in a futile attempt by the EU to persuade Tehran not to build nuclear weapons, a policy it has no intention of abandoning.
What is equally weird is how little attention this outrageous story has attracted from Britain’s media.
Solid facts, abstract thaws
Last Sunday I noted that sea-ice cover in the Arctic was 28 per cent higher than on the same date last year. Next day extensive coverage was given to a WWF report, addressed to EU environment ministers, claiming that Arctic ice is at a record low and may soon vanish altogether. It was illustrated with a computer image showing the extent of the ice in September 2007.
The following day, satellite readings showed that this year’s refreeze is so rapid that the ice was already 31 per cent up on last year.
The WWF is in part funded by the EU, not least because it is a leading promoter of the warming scare and can be relied on to provide such shameless propaganda.
But should the rest of us be expected to fall for it?