About those green jobs ... UK edition

Times:

One of Britain’s biggest employers in the green energy industry is to cease production within hours of a government announcement today pledging as many as 400,000 green jobs by 2015.

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, will claim that Britain will become a world leader in low-carbon technology and manufacturing. He will argue that raising household energy bills to pay for investment in wind, solar and tidal power is justified not only by the dangers of global warming but also the opportunity to build a new “green economy”.

However, tomorrow morning the Vestas factory in Newport, Isle of Wight, Britain’s only significant manufacturer of wind turbines, will produce its last batch of seven-tonne blades. More than 600 people employed at the plant, and a related facility in Southampton, will be made redundant at the end of the month. All 7,000 turbines that the Government will commit today to installing over the next decade will be manufactured overseas, mainly in Germany, Denmark and China.

Vestas managers and union leaders held meetings with Mr Miliband and officials to discuss the possibility of converting the factory — which supplies the US market — to produce a different type of blade suitable for British wind farms. The Government did not, however, offer any financial aid and was unable to give any assurances that it would break the planning logjam that has paralysed the British market for wind turbines.

...

The economics of "green" energy appear not to be working despite all the assistance and subsidies governments have showered on them. The fact is that without the government funding they never would have been viable and now with them they are still not viable.

Christopher Booker is merciless in his attack on the wind energy business in the UK.

...

So far we have spent billions of pounds on building just over 2,000 wind turbines - and yet they contribute barely one per cent of all the electricity that we need.

The combined output of all those 2,000 turbines put together, averaging 700 megawatts, is less than that of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.

What's more, far from being 'free', this pitiful dribble of electricity is twice as expensive as the power we get from the nuclear, gas or coal-fired power stations which currently supply well over 90 per cent of our needs - and we all pay the difference, without knowing it, through our electricity bills.

But despite its best efforts to conceal the fact that wind turbines expensively and unreliably generate only a derisory amount of electricity, the Government keeps on telling us of its megalomaniac plans to build thousands more of them - at a cost of up to £100billion.

The prime reason for this is that we are legally obliged by the European Union to generate 32 per cent of our electricity from 'renewable' sources by 2020.

...

Gordon Brown talks airily of building 4,000 offshore turbines by our target date - plus another 3,000 onshore. But this would mean sticking two of these 2,000-ton monsters, each the height of Blackpool Tower, into the seabed every day for the next 11 years.

Nowhere in the world has it proved possible to install more than one of them a week. The infrastructure simply isn't there to build more than a fraction of that figure.

...

Even if they erected the number targeted it would be unlikely that they could get the energy predicted and teh cost in the US is running about three times that of conventional energy. Another cost not mentioned is that of running the transmission lines the cost of which is substantial.