A powerful message about renewable energy

Maurice O'Brien • Published 22 Jul 2010 09:30 0 Comments

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THERE were 13 of them, stretching across a valley ridge above the southern reaches of Champagne-Ardenne. Sore thumbs, sticking out incongruously to mar the beauty of last October’s Indian summer.

Over the course of three days being driven round the department of Aube, we passed them from different directions seven or eight times. Blots on the landscape, it wasn’t the intrusiveness of those wind turbines which made the deepest impression. Every time we passed them they were virtually motionless.

Well, okay then, on a solitary occasion one in the middle started moving, but it never quite made a complete revolution and had stopped again by the time we’d dipped into the next valley. Of course they could all have been spinning like merry hell the rest of the time, but even the lady from the tourist office admitted she’d never seen them at full tilt.

And while incredible amounts of money have been made from research funding and subsidies, on average, onshore wind turbines generate just 25% of their theoretical capacity. At that rate, here in Britain future generations will either revert to power stations running on gas, oil or coal, which are all becoming increasingly scarce, or sit in the dark without their HD television and microwave suppers. You certainly can’t have your carbon credit and eat it! At best they reckon winds, waves, tides and sun are capable of providing a renewable third of our needs, so what about the rest?

In France, of course, non-turning windmills notwithstanding, nuclear energy already provides almost 80% of electricity.

Until a Miliband dipped his toe in the heavy water last autumn to announce 10 new nuclear power stations, New Labour had mostly seemed terrified of the elephant in the room, but with all that Con-Dem born-again greenery, the Clegeron Coalition has yet to be put to the test.

Nuclear energy is versatile, cheaper than oil and roughly the same price as gas and coal, and most importantly, modern reactors are safe; and on the whole healthier than the coal-fired power stations churning out millions of tons of ash and carbon, sulphur or nitrogen oxides.

Opponents still in thrall to the fairytale charms of wind power cite the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in 1986 as reasons why not.

But, because of inbuilt containment measures, the radioactive release from the former produced no health consequences, and the latter was a poorly-designed, shambolically-managed plant bereft of even basic safety measures.

Windpower’s as fanciful as it is unreliable but, to avoid our power supplies resembling Baghdad on a bad day, there’s no time to waste. So how splendid that under Dave’s Big Deal you’ll soon be able to nip out and buy your own neighbourhood nuclear reactor.

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