How can wind turbines generate so much lunacy?

To meet our peak demand of 56 gigawatts of electricity would require 112,000 turbines covering 11,000 square miles, or an eighth of Britain's entire land area, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher BookerPublished: 5:48PM BST 18 Jul 2009
It would be hard to beat the sad gullibility with which the media last week reported the plans of Lord Mandelson and our Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband to cover our countryside and sea with 10,000 more huge wind turbines. According to one newspaper, it would need "an area of only 70 square miles to generate Britain's total power requirements".
Well, no, actually. To meet our peak demand of 56 gigawatts of electricity would require 112,000 turbines covering 11,000 square miles, or an eighth of Britain's entire land area.


Another newspaper solemnly reported that a new study shows that "a well-placed turbine could make enough energy to power 825,000 homes". Well, no, actually. The figure for a single 2 megawatt turbine would be just 825 homes, meaning that the newspaper was only 100,000 per cent wrong.
Even more alarming than the media's credulity is that of the ministers themselves, in seriously trying to pretend that their £100 billion dream of building three giant turbines every day between now and 2020 has the faintest practical hope of being realised, let alone that it would serve any useful purpose to do so.
Most alarming of all, however, in the desperation to reach EU "renewables" target, is the setting up of a new Infrastructure Planning Commission to force through thousands of these absurd objects over the wishes of local people and councils, who are now to be robbed of any right of appeal. Last week a Government inspector threw out a highly unpopular scheme for seven turbines in Shropshire which would have generated £43 million in subsidies alone for its owners over the next 25 years. The surrounding community was delighted. From next March, however, thanks to Lord Mandelson's all-powerful new Commission, such inquiries will be a thing of the past, thrown onto the scrapheap of history along with much of the rest of our democracy, We will no longer have any right to oppose this tsunami of lunacy, until our countryside is ruined to no rational purpose whatever.