Greater transparency needed over wind power

THE recent article by Paul Jeeves (Yorkshire Post, April 22) raises the growing demands for much greater transparency on the performance and financial arrangements of onshore wind factories.

The Department of Energy publishes only a monthly average figure for the output from wind turbines, based on claims from operators. However, since November 2008, reliable real time figures for wind generated electricity fed in to the National Grid have been publicly available, and these show a very different picture to that which the Government and the wind industry would have us believe.

In his recent report, Stuart Young reviews the outputs over a 26-month period, and refutes the Government’s assertions that wind turbines generate on average 30 per cent of their rated output (they generated 21.14 per cent in 2010). He also demonstrates that there are frequent periods of low wind generation (37 per cent of the time in 2010, they were generating at 10 per cent or less).

These low generation periods frequently coincide with high demand for electricity, and there is no evidence that high wind in one region compensates for low wind in another area. The availability of reliable data should now lead to a fundamental review of the any future expansion of onshore wind capacity, which will only ever be viable if backed up by conventional capacity operating inefficiently, or by new methods of electricity storage, such as hydrogen cells.