Wind farm operators were paid £2.6m to keep their wind turbines idle in May, in addition to the £900,000 they were paid in April.  National Grid, the operator of the power network made the payments which are ultimately paid for by the consumer.

The power network development by the National Grid has not kept pace with the construction of wind farms as many are in Scotland and the larger demand for electricity is in England. The National Grid claimed the £900,000 payments in April were ‘exceptional’ and Charles Hendry, the energy minister also described them as an ‘anomaly’. Clearly not quite correct from either party!

Research undertaken by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) has revealed four energy companies were paid to switch off their turbines on 16 different ocasions in May. Seven wind farms came off-line on May 24 for a total of 69 hours costing the grid, but ultimately the consumer £613,000.

Scottish and Southern Energy was paid £1m to shut the 52 turbine Hadyard Hill wind farm for effectively six days in May.

Scottish Power was paid £720,000 for shutting three wind farms, including Whitelee in Ayrshire which is the largest onshore wind farm in Europe. This comes after Scottish Power announced a 10% increase in electricity prices last week!

Should planning applications and the subsequent construction of new onshore and offshore wind farms be put on hold until the National Grid can catch up?  On one occasion in May, infrastructure problems meant Scotland had to buy electricity from England while two Scottish wind farms were paid £34,000 to shut down. It seems the big energy companies who tend to develop these wind farms are making money from producing and selling electricity, making money from not producing electricity, and then increasing the price of their electricity to the consumer. The whole situation seems absurd.

A typical wind turbine generates power worth about £150,000 a year, but attracts subsidies worth £250,000. These are designed to encourage power companies to build wind farms , but are added directly to consumers bills. Some landowners can receive an annual income of between £15,000 and £20,000 a turbine with the rest going to the energy companies.

£1 billion a year for the last 5 years has gone into subsidising wind farms. Without these subsidies they would not have been built.

Wind turbines produce less than 5% of our power needs, but Britain is committed to a target of producing 20% of power from renewable sources by 2020.

A large number of wind farms have been constructed in Scotland and Wales. Unfortunately, adequate transmission lines have not been built to enable the flow of power to England where consumption is higher.

In April 2011 power companies operating 6 wind farms in Scotland were paid nearly £900,000 to switch off their turbines for a night because the National Grid did not need the power. This was to compensate for the loss of their subsidies and the income from the power they would have sold.

The payments, up to 20 times the value of the power the wind farms would have produced, were offered by the National Grid because it urgently needed to reduce the electricity entering the system. The power could have been used in England, but the transmission cables lacked the capacity to carry it south.

Whitelee – £312,654 – Scottish Power – 6 times the wholesale value
Hadyard Hill – £134,095 – Scottish and Southern Energy – 3.5 times the wholesale value
Black Law – £132,263
Farr 1 & 2 – £263,484 – Npower Renewables – 20 times the wholesale value
Millennium – £32,534
Total = £875,030

Last year Welsh wind farms produced only 19% of the theoretical maximum energy they could generate. In calm weather, wind turbines across Britain can remain stationary for weeks, and up to 3 months of the year they will produce almost no power at all.

Are wind farms really just a white elephant? Is it really worth spending all this tax payers money to help fund large power companies…?

Biofuels, bioethanol, biodiesel, biogas – the list of new fuel types seems to be growing by the week. Are they the future for energy and fuels?

British Airways
British Airways has announced a landmark deal to build the first plant in Europe producing jet fuel from waste material.

The plant, planned for East London, will use half million tonnes of waste each year producing around 16 million gallons of fuel. Starting production in 2014, BA says it will generate double the fuel needed for all flights from London City Airport.

BA argues the plant will cut the amount of waste that is sent to landfill, reducing the amount of methane that is produced. Methane is suggested to be a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Biofuel creation
Waste matter is fed into a high temperature ‘gasifier’ to produce BioSynGas. A chemical process called Fischer Tropsch is then used to convert the gas into biofuel.

Waste products from the process can power the plant and supply 20MW of electricity to the national grid. A solid waste product can be used as an aggregate in construction.

The fuel produced by the plant is certified for use in other countries, but not currently in the UK.

Biofuels
Biofuels are a sort of fuel made from living matter, or from the waste they produce. This is a long and diverse list, but includes:
• wood and straw
• biogas (methane) from animals’ excrement
• ethanol, diesel or other liquid fuels made from processing plant material or waste oil

In recent years, the term ‘biofuel’ has come to mean the last category - ethanol and diesel, made from crops including corn, sugarcane and rapeseed.

Bio-ethanol, an alcohol, is usually mixed with petrol, while biodiesel is either used on its own or in a mixture.