!? El REg is paid for by advertisers.
They're not public service, they are under no obligation to give any kind of balanced view.
That said, this research is probably bogus for the same reason the EMF research reported today is bogus.
However, anti-addick, you are either an idiot or genuinely want to wear a hair shirt.
Wind farms simply *cannot* provide enough reliable electricity for you to continue living your lifestyle. Source: National Grid study of wind farm penetration.
Do you accept that you can't have the heating, lighting, ventilation, computing, transport and food that you currently enjoy on demand because of the rolling blackouts that will become both *necessary* and *commonplace* if wind really does reach the current target penetration?
I don't. I do not want to be spending such ridiculous amounts of my tax money supporting something that can only cause me pain - both financial due to the extremely high cost and personal due to the blackouts. (Note that blackouts can and do kill people.)
Wind farms are simply not fit for being used as a significant generating source, and it doesn't matter how good we get at making them, they still won't be. To avoid rolling blackouts, we have to have at least 5 days of backup power available because the entire country and all our neighbours can be in the doldrums for that long.
National Grid say that the target wind penetration can lose 15GW of generation in a couple of hours. At the moment such a loss is *impossible* - even disconnecting Drax (4GW) wouldn't do that!
They also think that the only way to maintain current service levels with such a lot of wind is to have gas plants running 'hot' 24 hours a day, ready to sync at a few minutes notice.
That's a lot of wasted CO2 - burning loads of hydrocarbon to keep the backup plants hot, just to cover for when the wind gets too strong or too weak.
If you genuinely want to be Green, then you should be *against* wind.
It can't provide our current demand without burning *more* hydrocarbon than at present.
Now, if we want to move to electric vehicles (any kind) instead of burning hydrocarbons in our cars, trains, buses, lorries etc , we're going to need *more* electricity than we currently have.
So, how do you plan on doing that?
Nuclear power is the only currently feasible way of generating enough sustainable low-to-zero carbon power. The French know this, and we actually buy a lot from them.
Sure, in the future we might find more compact and efficient ways to store large amounts of electricity, and other ways to generate large amounts of environmentally-friendly electricity predictably and on demand.