The Economist

Wind power
Tilting at windmills
Mar 18th 2004 | GREAT GLEMHAM, SUFFOLK
From The Economist print edition

Wind power was expected to flourish offshore. So why is it mostly onshore?

THE hedgerows of Great Glemham, a small village in Suffolk, make an unusual
billboard for political posters. Currently they feature eye-catching
protests against plans for a wind farm on a disused airfield in next-door
Parham. When the project was announced in December, residents mostly
welcomed the idea. Many have now changed their mind and relations with the
farmer who owns the site, an upstanding member of the Parish Council, have
become strained. In the middle of one Saturday night, someone snuck around
taking all the posters down.

When subsidies for wind energy were first mooted, most wind farms were
expected to be built offshore, since there is a lot of wind there and
seagulls don't sit on planning committees. But the subsidy system, under
which wind farms sell renewable obligation certificates (ROCs) to
conventional generators, rewards onshore and offshore farms equally, and
building on land is less risky or costly than building at sea, where special
barges costing £30m each are needed to manoeuvre the turbines into position.
Developers therefore favour onshore projects, and farmers, driven by falling
agricultural incomes to look for new sources of income, are happy to oblige.
Of 22 wind farms due to be built this year, 21 are onshore.

Wind farms get around three times as much in subsidy-a mixture of selling
ROCs and a share of fines paid by non-renewable plants-as they do from
selling electricity. Powergen reckons that putting up just two or three
turbines becomes viable on this model. Other investors are picking up on
this too: Saxon Windpower, the company that wants to put up six turbines on
Parham airfield, is backed by a venture capital fund based in the Bahamas.
Small wind farms are therefore proliferating.

The hostility aroused by the Parham project is not unusual either. Some
locals complain that wind farms are noisy, ugly and (citing estate agents)
that they reduce property prices. Others, like John Constable, who lives 700
metres away from the airfield, say they are just inappropriate. "I happen to
like the Chrysler building," he says, "but I don't want it near my house."

The British Wind Energy Association says around half of all planning
applications in England get scuppered (mostly by angry local residents),
though the success rate is higher in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Locals
have some control, but not as much as they would like: district councils
decide on applications for wind farms with a capacity of under 50MW (around
25 turbines), while bigger proposals go to central government.

Wind farms' opponents argue that a carbon tax would be a better way of
discouraging pollution than subsidising particular forms of renewable
energy-and that, among green energy sources, wind is one of the least
efficient. Hugh Sharman, author of several studies of wind power in west
Denmark, which has the highest concentration of turbines anywhere in the
world, points out that in February last year the wind stopped blowing and
almost no power was generated. When this happens electricity has to be
imported from elsewhere or generated by conventional plants kept as back-up.
This isn't very green: keeping thermal power stations ticking over consumes
energy without producing any useful power, and cranking them up and down is
inefficient and dirty.