Family energy bills could soar by more than £300 a year because of the obsession with wind power, according to John Ingham in the Daily Express.
He says a World Bank adviser claims our government’s green crusade “blunder” could cost £124billion. It estimates that by 2020 domestic electricity bills will have risen by up to 58% under plans for a huge increase in the number of onshore and offshore wind turbines
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Ingham says, in a report Professor Gordon Hughes warned that wind power may even fail in its aim of cutting greenhouse gases.
Hughes said: “Unless the current Government scales back its commitment to wind power very substantially, its policy will be worse than a mistake, it will be a blunder.”
In a report for Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Hughes said family electricity bills will rise to nearly £850 a year from their current £528 to pay for wind power technology.
He claimed the same electricity could be provided by modern combined gas cycle plants for £13billion – nearly 10 times cheaper.
Hughes, a professor of economics at Edinburgh University, branded wind power “an extraordinarily expensive and inefficient way of reducing CO2 emissions.”
He said it could lead to higher emissions because wind is so intermittent that back-up will be needed – almost certainly gas power stations.
The report, which has been submitted as evidence to the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, said the likeliest policy of a mix of onshore and offshore wind farms would also be more expensive than building modern gas power stations.
More information: www.ed.ac.uk/