HOWZAT

BRITAIN is not alone in fighting about green energy. Similar battles are being played out all over Europe. And the answer that emerges from each is that wind can provide only a fraction of the answer.

In southern Spain, fishermen from the ports of Barbate and Conil are determined to fight off a business consortium that wants to build a £3 billion wind farm in the shallow waters off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson on his column in Trafalgar Square would be dwarfed by the 500-plus turbines, each 460ft high.

Spain now has 405 wind farms, including the world’s largest at Tarifa. Yet the 1,745 megawatts generated serves only 175,000 of Spain’s 20m-plus homes.

Furthermore, the Spaniards have learnt that the fluctuating supply from wind farms can destabilise the whole grid. In March a combination of cold air and low winds sent demand for power soaring while wind farms ground to a halt. Spain’s power companies kept the nation’s lights on only by cutting voltages, a so-called brown-out, and disconnecting 300 industrial users.

Germany faces similar crises. Since Gerhard Schröder decided to phase out nuclear power the German government has been committed to expanding green energy. Germany today has more turbines than America — around 16,500 — with 1,201 added last year alone. Renewable energy now accounts for 9.3% of domestic energy consumption, and there are plans to expand this to 25% by 2025.

Yet all those windmills have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by only 2.5%, according to the German environment ministry.

The 2004 “wind report” from E.ON, one of Germany’s biggest producers of energy, explains why so much outlay has achieved so little. It points out that wind power is so unreliable that a power company can avoid blackouts only by keeping conventional power stations, with at least 50% of the capacity of its wind farms, on permanent standby. Wind power reaching the German grid in 2003 was just a sixth of the installed capacity.

Conversely, when the wind blows hard, the sudden power surge can burn out circuits and put the whole grid at risk. Such surges frequently threaten blackouts in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.

And the price is far from right. The German government’s economic advisory council has warned that subsidies for green electricity will help push power prices up by a third in the next five years.

It is, then, little surprise that Schröder has just signed a deal with Russia to deliver 30 billion cubic feet of gas a year to Germany.

Britain could end up doing the same.

OUR electricity supply was for decades overseen by a single body, the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), with a brief to keep the lights on whatever happened.

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