Breezy

BRITAIN
Wind farms

Feb 3rd 2005
From The Economist print edition

Plans for wind farms multiply faster than evidence that they work

BRITAIN is top of a previously unknown league: countries in which to invest profitably in wind farms, according to Ernst & Young, an accountancy firm. As a result, wind farms are spreading across the country like warm butter.

According to a study by Platts Power UK, a specialist energy magazine, 21 gigawatts (GW) of large renewable power projects are being planned for the next five years. Britain currently has about 1GW installed now, with an extra 2.5GW either being built or awaiting construction in the next 12 months. If all the projects that are in the planning system now—plus all those that are being plotted but have not yet made it to planning—are built, this would mean about 200 extra wind farms, according to Dominic Maclaine of Platts.

Though this is unlikely to happen, as many schemes won't get planning permission and others will not get the necessary funding, the Platts report does highlight a problem in the way the pseudo-market is set up. Wind farms get one Renewable Obligation Certificate (ROC) for each megawatt-hour they generate. Power-distribution companies then buy them, or face fines for failing to buy a set proportion of renewable energy every year. If all this capacity were to be built, the ROCs would lose around a quarter of their value. That's because they hold their value only if there are not enough of them to go round.

The quirks of the ROCs market are just a distraction when compared with the other problems that advocates of wind power face, though. The evidence from countries like Germany and Denmark, where wind power has been tried on a larger scale, is not encouraging. A report by E.ON Netz, which runs part of Germany's electricity grid, found that over the course of 2003 the juice from wind farms amounted to only a sixth of their installed capacity. That's mostly because wind power is hard to forecast. If the forecast differs from the actual generation, the shortfall must be met by using reserve capacity. Conversely, there's no way to store excess electricity when the wind blows unexpectedly hard.

A second problem comes from increasingly vocal resistance to wind farms from local campaigners. People such as John Constable, an English literature don at Cambridge University, who knows lots about the mathematical differences between poetry and prose, can make formidable opponents. Mr Constable started investigating the viability of wind farms when one was proposed near his house. Now he is research director for the Renewable Energy Foundation, which takes a sceptical attitude towards wind power. Groups such as Highlands Before Pylons, which worries about the big pylons needed to connect new turbines to the power grid, have also multiplied, and are determined to get Britain demoted from the top spot.

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