THE air above Yatabe Minami elementary school is heavy with humidity. The playground swelters without the slightest breath of breeze, and on the highest trees the leaves do not flicker. The sails of the Darius-Savonius generator stand still.

Tsukuba, the town that prides itself as Japan’s most hallowed scientific research centre, is the site of perhaps the world’s worst electricity wind farm: in the 12 months it has operated, its windmills have consumed 43 times more power than they have generated.

The project to make Tsukuba a self-sufficient showpiece for green energy has failed, bringing scorn upon the government programme to test alternative sources. It is likely to be cited by sceptics elsewhere, including in Britain, where the Government published its energy review this week. Tsukuba is involved in civil litigation, criminal investigations and an assault on the academic reputation of Waseda University, Japan’s most respected seat of learning.

Amid the embarrassment of Tsukuba’s stagnant windmills things have descended into farce. To give the appearance of a functioning alternative energy programme, when dignitaries visit and on parent-teacher evenings, the generators become motors and the sails are made to turn artificially.

For the children of Tsukuba, who watched with fascination as the 10m turbines rose in their grounds, summer science projects are in ruins. They had planned to keep daily registers of how much electricity the windmills were producing but, after a couple of weeks of finding the needles stuck at “0.0kWh”, the excitement faded. The three windmills at Yatabe are among 23 installed last July at schools around the high-tech university town of Tsukuba, which had intended to install first dozens, then possibly hundreds more. Home to top-secret industrial laboratories, Japan’s space programme and a big robotics institute, Tsukuba has long been pitched as its technology showcase.

Unfortunately it has an average wind-speed of 2.5km/h (1.5mph) — a far cry from the 15-20km/h needed to make a wind farm work. At some schools one or two windmills have occasionally begun spinning in winter gusts. Among them, the 23 windmills have produced one megawatt in 12 months, having been expected to generate more than 200.

Experts in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry are appalled. Shunji Kawamura, the director of its Industrial Technology Research Institute, said: “It should have been perfectly clear the windmills would never work.”

The sails of the model of windmill purchased by Tsukuba are not turning, but nevertheless consume nearly three megawatts a year.

The Tsukuba City citizens’ ombudsman has taken the local authorities to court, demanding that the taxpayers’ wasted millions be returned. The academics and industrialists who form the ombudsman’s body have found what they claim is a network of bid-rigging scams and other corruption associated with the project. Police have begun a criminal investigation. “Tsukuba has the reputation of being the highest-tech city in the world, but it is run by people out of the 19th century,” Daijiro Kameyama, the head of the Shisei ombudsman, said.

Tsukuba City is conducting its own civil suit against Waseda University, whose research suggested that the windmills would generate huge amounts of free electricity. The windmills were built by a Waseda University spin-off company.

GALE POWER

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