Green tractor production in Britain is at an all time high!

Or so we learn from Business Green, the UK environment industry’s equivalent to Pravda, in a piece celebrating the fact that 2014 was a “record-breaking year for wind energy” with “11 per cent of all Britain’s electricity generated by wind last year.”

Anyone who thinks this is good news needs their head examining.

First, and most obviously, it means that the matchlessly beautiful British landscape – poor Scotland’s, especially – is now blighted with more bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes than ever.

Secondly, it means that more money is being wasted on subsidies than ever before. According to John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation, British energy users are now stung to the tune of £2 billion a year for onshore and offshore wind subsidies.

Warren Buffett once famously said of wind farms: “They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

What is true for the US is also true for the UK. Industrial wind represents the worst kind of crony capitalism: not one single eco-crucifix would be sullying our skylines anywhere in the world were it not for the hand-outs we are forced by government fiat to pay to the noisome green troughers for this expensive, ugly, destructive, inefficient form of energy production.

Thirdly, it means Britain’s electricity grid is more vulnerable than ever before. The greater the share of the “energy mix” taken up by renewable energy, the more painfully exposed it becomes to the problem of “intermittency” – ie, in wind energy’s case, those many periods when the wind isn’t blowing. This comment from below the Business Green post sums up the problem:

Many of us remember 4 November last year when National Grid announced an emergency ‘Notification of Inadequate System Margin’ (NISM) for the first time since 2011.

At the time the NISM was issued, the entire metered wind fleet, onshore and offshore, was officially recorded as producing as little as 130MW from 8,403MW of headline capacity.

That emergency was on a day when demand was low, with very mild weather. God help us if we lose thermal generators when the weather is seriously cold and wind is failing to perform.

The closure of more coal-fired power stations and the ongoing failure to replace them with reliable generating capacity have further decreased the security margin, leaving our electricity supply system more exposed to disruption than at any time for at least a decade.