Britain’s wealthiest wind farm developer has said he can no longer afford to apply to put up any more turbines because the Conservatives have now stacked the planning process against him.

And if that sounds like good news, you haven’t heard the best of it yet. The developer in question is none other than Dale Vince.

Yes, that’s Dale Vince as in the dog-on-a-rope-crustie turned eco opportunist who has made an estimated £100 million by despoiling the British countryside, slicing and dicing its wildlife, and driving up our electricity prices with his next-to-useless bat-chomping eco-crucifixes.

Dale Vince as in the sanctimonious vegan whose first moves on buying up Forest Green Football Club were to ban the players from eating red meat, to ban red meat from being sold at the ground and to have the “organic” pitch cut with a solar-powered lawn mower.

Dale Vince, the very examplar of the kind of rent-seeking, crony-capitalist hyena who has thrived in our cynical, corrupt, post-crash world where the economy is no longer about free markets or generating value but whatever handy deals you can stitch up with Big Government.

Or, to put it another way, Vince has made his fortune from just 60 turbines spread on 17 sites around Britain. That works out at well over a million pounds per turbine. And for what, exactly? Unreliable, intermittent, environmentally destructive energy which would have little if any value in an open market and whose presence in our economy is down to one thing and one thing only: the massive subsidies which consumers are forced to pay as a gesture of obeisance to the green goddess Gaia (and her many friends everywhere from Greenpeace and the Conservative party to the European Commission).

So no. I don’t think too many of us will be shedding tears that this smug multimillionaire in his £3 million fort home will no longer be dragging down fellow-country-dwellers’ property values by plonking his hideous great turbines bang in the middle of their idyllic rural landscapes.

On the contrary, we’ll be asking ourselves: why didn’t someone put a stop to his scam earlier? Like, maybe, right at the beginning before he’d had the chance to put up a single turbine, thus forcing him to get a job more fitting to his talents like, maybe, being one of those grumpy sods at fairgrounds who gives you a crap fluffy toy when you’ve successfully hooked one of the plastic ducks.

Still, Vince is right about one thing. The Conservative element in the Coalition is definitely rowing back hard from those idiot environmental policies it introduced when David Cameron announced his intention to lead “the greenest government ever” (from the rooftop of Greenpeace London HQ, no less). That’s why so many more wind farm projects are being killed at the planning stage or scrapped as a result of the personal intervention of Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, who has “called in” 53 mooted wind projects and nixed 22 out of 25 of the ones he has examined so far.

“He’s scared of UKIP,” Vince recently grumbled to The Times.

And I’m sure he is right about that too. UKIP remains the only one of Britain’s main parties which has a coherent and sensible policy on renewable energy – which is to say that it recognises it is a complete joke. So in this case I don’t think the Conservatives have anything to feel embarrassed about, taking a leaf out of UKIP’s book, because it is the only right, decent and sensible thing to do.

What they should very much feel embarrassed about is David Cameron’s failure to have talked sense on the issue earlier. Let us never forget that the 2008 Climate Change Act, the most expensive and pointless legislation in recent parliamentary history – which costs the UK taxpyer at least £18 billion in wasted expenditure every year and which is in good part to blame for the kinds of green energy scheme from which Vince has made so much money, was as much the brainchild of David Cameron as it was of the Miliband brothers.