The onshore wind farm industry in Britain is under threat from councils using new planning rules to block the construction of thousands of turbines.

Milton Keynes, Stratford-on-Avon, Cherwell in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Staffordshire councils are using planning rules to create ‘separation zones’ around wind farms.

These ban new turbines within up to 2km (1¼ miles) of homes. This would mean that less than 1% of the country could be used for wind farms.

RWE npower renewable, Britain’s biggest investor in green energy, has launched a High Court judicial review against Milton Keynes, whose 1km separation zone was one of the first to be implemented.

If RWE lose the Milton Keynes court case then other councils could introduce similar policies which would effectively kill the construction of new wind turbines.

The collective visual and environmental impact of turbines in rural areas is enormous and ruining our countryside, aside from the fact that they are inefficient and don’t generate enough power.

Wind farm developers have been accused of deceiving local councils and the public by using computer-generated images in planning applications that make turbines seem smaller than they are in reality.

The usual and accepted practice was for a photograph of the landscape where the turbines are to be sited to be taken on a camera with a 50mm lens. This is then digitally stitched together with other 50mm shots to create a long, shallow panorama on an A3 page.

The problem is that the human eye does not take in the whole panorama, but focuses on the middle section where the wind farm company has placed the computer-generated images of the turbines, giving the impression of a small development on a large landscape.

The claim is contained in a new book, Windfarm Visualisation: Perspective or Perception, by Alan Macdonald, an architect whose company Architect which specialises in computer-generated images.

“A printed 50mm photographic image will always under-represent our perception of the scale of a more distant object because we are looking at a flat image devoid of any depth information,” says Macdonald.

The University of Stirling conducted a study which found serious flaws in the images that are presented as part of a visual impact assessment in the planning process. They also found that the use of the industry-standard 50mm lens to be misleading.

Jeremy Clarkson recently wrote, “I predict that 30 years from now there will be just one wind turbine in Britain. It’ll have been kept as a reminder of the time when mankind temporarily took leave of its senses and decided wind, waves and lashings of tofu could somehow generate enough electricity for the whole planet.”

Generous government subsidies are enabling Britain’s 10 worst-performing wind farms to earn a total of £1.3m a year, despite producing electricity worth only half of that.

The Ecotricity wind turbine beside the M4 in Reading runs on average at just over 16% of its capacity. It earned £229,700 in 2010-11, but half of that was paid in subsidy as the electricity generated was worth about £115,000.

The worst performing turbine is at GlaxoSmithKline’s pharmaceutical plant at Barnard Castle, Co Durham which ran at just 8.2% of capacity and earned £26,000, half of which was paid as subsidy by the government’s renewable obligation scheme.

Whitelee in East Renfrewshire, Britain’s biggest onshore wind farm, with 140 turbines is not much better, running at an average 20% of capacity, or load factor – the proportion of power generated compared with the theoretical maximum. This was still enough to ensure that in 2011 it got £31m in subsidy, according to government figures.

The industry generally quotes an average load factor of 30%. The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) has found that in 2010 79% of Britain’s wind farms are operating at less than 30% of capacity.

The renewables industry blames poor performance in 2010 on a shortage of wind. However, the figures also raise serious questions about where turbines are being built. All top 10 performers are in Scotland, and the only two that operate at more than 50% capacity are on the Shetland Isles. John Constable, director of the REF, said: “The consumer is paying to make these wind farms artificially viable. Why are our subsidies so generous that it makes sense to build wind farms in places where there is, frankly, no wind? This is just not smart.”

The problem with wind power is demonstrated well in Denmark, which embraced the technology years ago. And as a result not a single conventional power station has been shut down. They’re needed for the days when the wind doesn’t blow, or blows too strongly. Worse, ramping them up and down all the time uses more energy than keeping them working constantly. So the Danes have paid a fortune to build wind farms that don’t work, and, in return, their normal power stations are producing even more CO2 than they did in the past.

Rural Voice asks: “What is the point in building hundreds of wind turbines that are ruining our countryside and which can’t even do the job they’re built for? The only winners are the energy companies which own them. The environment loses, the taxpayer loses, and rural community loses.

Chris Huhne and his Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) propose building 32,000 more wind turbines. This construction programme would transform Britain’s landscapes, with an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 new turbines needed onshore and up to 25,000 offshore.

Britain already has 3,400 onshore and offshore turbines which only generate 1-2% of the nation’s power. Wind turbines, along with nuclear power, are regarded as the most economically viable green energy sources.

Professor David MacKay, chief science adviser to DECC has calculated that even if 10% of the country was covered with wind turbines, it would generate only a sixth of the nation’s energy needs. All types of renewables generally produce about 2.5 watts of electricity per square metre. A nuclear power station, by comparison, produces about 1,000 watts per square metre.

A joint report just published from the Adam Smith Institute and the Scientific Alliance, argues that the government’s focus on renewable energy sources is misguided. The report, Renewable Energy: Vision or Mirage, says: “as renewable energy sources produce power intermittently, they cannot replace gas, coal and nuclear generation, even with further development”.

The storms last week highlighted this raising concerns about the reliability and cost of wind turbines. In Scotland, the wind turbines were generating more than 2,000 megawatts, but as the wind speed increased, the turbines started to shut down. By midday, output had fallen to 708 megawatts. Funnily enough, the turbine operators had predicted they would operate normally.

Sir Bernard Ingham, secretary of the pressure group Supporters of Nuclear Energy, said: “They are no good when the wind doesn’t blow and they are no good when the wind does blow.”

Energy experts say the unreliability of wind turbines means extra expenditure is needed to ensure they are always backed up by other power sources. John Constable, director of policy and research for the Renewable Energy Foundation, said: “it is a very expensive way of generating power because this shows you need two systems running in parallel.”

Is this just another example of a politician wanting to leave their stamp in history? Guess who pays for the politicians grand plans, the paying consumer!! Why not just build more nuclear power stations.

A wind turbine at the Ardrossan Windfarm in Ayrshire, Scotland bursts into flames due to high winds and severe weather.

The 30 megawatt windfarm has a total of fifteen Danish manufactured turbines which each stand 100m (328ft) high. Rather ironically today, one of the wind turbines, which are obviously made to harness the natural power of the wind, couldn’t cope and burst into flames.

Wind power isn’t necessarily the wonderful gift that Chris Huhne and the government would like us to believe. They are now proposing to build another 32,000 wind turbines in addition to the existing c.3,000 turbines. Are these going to be build near houses? The video below also highlights the dangers of wind turbines in high winds.

Each member of the public could save £550 by 2020 if the government scraps expensive wind energy plans in favour of cheaper nuclear and gas-fired power plants.

KPMG, the accountants and adviser on government energy policy will this week publish a controversial report saying that Britain can reach the 2020 target on reducing pollution imposed by the European Union for a third less than predicted, a potential saving of £34 billion.

To achieve this saving, the proportion of wind power envisaged would need to be slashed and the energy shortfall made up by new gas and nuclear power stations.

Wind power is by far the most expensive form of electricity generation to build, and with 5.5m households already suffering from ‘fuel poverty’, energy prices will only rise further substantially increasing this figure.

Nuclear and gas powered plants would cost £74 billion, considerably less than the £108 billion required for the current programme.

Based on current building costs an 800 megawatt gas-fired power station, capable of producing round-the-clock power for 800,000 homes, will cost about £400m. By contrast, an off-shore wind farm with the same capacity, will cost £2.4bn which is similar to a nuclear plant. A wind farm will only produce power for about one-third of the time due to weather conditions so would also need to be backed-up by another gas-fired power station as well.

These figures do not include the billions required for all the additional unsightly national grid power lines to remote places where many wind farms are located.

On top of the financial implications, what about the environmental issues with thousands of huge wind turbines in many unspoilt parts of the countryside, and the increased heavy construction traffic through village communities.

Surely a rethink is required…

TCI Renewables are now trying to destroy the North Downs countryside in Hampshire with the proposed application for eleven 150 metre high wind turbines at Woodmancott Down, which would be visible from up to 20 miles away.

The proposed location is centred on the hamlets of Popham and Woodmancott and surrounded by the villages of Preston Candover, Chilton Candover, Brown Candover, East Stratton, West Stratton, North Waltham, Dummer and Axford.

Are these energy companies entirely blind to the beauty of the UK countryside, or purely driven by greed and indifference to the damage they cause? This damage can come in many forms:

• the environmental damage to the surrounding area, both during and after construction
• the obvious visual damage to the countryside and views
• a number of safety issues during the construction with huge increases in lorry traffic on small country lanes
• the financial cost to the local community of falling house prices

When are we going to say enough is enough and stop the destruction of our ‘green and pleasant land’?!!

No Woodmancott Down Wind farm