Price of Gas

Christopher Booker - The IPCC declares Greenpeace in our time

Another of the scores of sites across Britain where wind farm plans are now arousing huge anger and unhappiness among locals is the Althorp estate in Northamptonshire, where Earl Spencer is hoping that a French company, EDF, will be allowed to spend £2.5 million to erect 13 2MW turbines, towering 385ft over the Vale of Avon Dassett. These will provide their owners with subsidies of around £650,000 a year, for producing a quantity of power so small that its fluctuating contribution to the grid will scarcely register. Compare this to the nearly 900MW output of the £400 million gas-fired power station recently opened near Plymouth and it can be seen that the capital cost of these wind farms, for the puny amount of electricity they produce, is around 10 times as much. The expense of the Welsh Assembly's £2 billion plan to build 800 turbines, up to 415ft high, across a vast stretch of mid-Wales, plus 100 miles of pylons to connect them to the grid, will be a staggering 15 times higher than would be needed to produce the same amount of power from gas, without subsidy.

Some back of the envelope calculations, if we wanted to power UK with gas and wind, with wind at 40% penetration (I'm assuming that's at 40% of expected capacity rather than nameplate capacity): calcs