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There's enough wind blowing across this island nation to provide all of the UK's electricity needs three or four times over. Despite this abundant natural resource, the government seems more interested in investing in carbon capture programs and new nuclear power stations. To get to the bottom of the UK's apparent aversion to wind power, we spoke to Dale Vince, Founder and MD of Ecotricity and self-styled 'zero-carbonista'.
SmartPlanet: How can we realise wind power's potential in the UK?
Dale Vince: Wind should make up to around 50 per cent of the UK's electricity, but we are nowhere near that. To get there we need to change the planning laws, because we have a planning regime that is not fit for purpose. The fact is that wind is the only generating technology in the hand of district councils; everything else is in the hands of the government.
Wind is only in this situation because the planning rules were written for a 50MW cut off, below which district councils were made responsible. That limit was set because 50MW would be a very small gas or coal power station. However, 50MW is actually a very large wind farm, so it has fallen in an unintended trap. Two-thirds of wind farm applications are turned down by district councils, and two-thirds of them are upheld on appeal by the government. This generates wholly unnecessary costs and delay.
SP: Does that mean there is local resistance to wind farms?
DV: What happens is that a few people kick up a lot of fuss, form a pressure group and generate a lot of fear and media coverage. In fact when you do surveys, eight out of ten people think wind farms are a good idea, one is against and one doesn't know.
Unfortunately it is the one who is against that gets the headlines and has created the myth that wind is unpopular. Planning bodies who have a national view will vote for the national good, but district councils have members who think fighting wind is a populist cause. They are not interested in national strategy or energy crises, they are backyard operators and are totally unfit for the job they are being asked to do.
SP: So what is the solution?
DV: We need to change the planning laws. Putting it all in the hands of the government might be seen as a draconian or radical solution, so we could set limits. Perhaps allow district councils to deal with up to 5MW of energy, covering one to three turbines, give up to 20-30MW to county councils, because they are much more used to dealing with strategic issues like schools and waste, and give above 20-30MW to the government.
SP: Can offshore wind also solve planning problems?
DV: Offshore wind is incredibly expensive, and with Shell pulling out the London Array project you have got confirmation that it is uneconomic. We have been saying this for ages: offshore wind costs about twice as much per unit as onshore wind. The main cost is installing the turbines and getting the power back to shore. Weather windows also limit construction and maintenance time, cutting the turbine availability time.
The main reason we keep hearing that about offshore is because the big utilities are chasing it and they have convinced the government that it is the answer to the onshore planning problem. One of the claims for offshore wind is that you can get a better load factor of up of 40 per cent, compared to a good onshore site of 30 per cent. But the government's own published statistics of the first offshore farms showed that not a single one of them produced a load factors of more than 30 per cent.
SP: What about microgeneration, is this an important part of wind power moving forward?
DV: Smaller microgeneration projects, such as the 1kW wind turbines that people install on their houses, are simply not economic. Output claims are often exaggerated and if you do real numbers, then you are looking at 20 years payback, which is probably beyond the life of most of those machines.
For big businesses the story is different, and we have a scheme called Merchant Wind Power, where we build large-scale wind installations for companies like Ford and Sainsbury's. These are the same 2MW turbines that are used in conventional onshore wind farms, and they can generate about four times as much energy as 2,0001kW micro-wind turbines, at about half the cost.
I don't want to sound too negative about microgeneration, because it engages people about where their energy comes from and makes them use it more wisely. But we have a limited amount of money and should be spending on macrogeneration -- in fact we should spend it all on onshore wind.
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