Too much faith – and subsidy – is ploughed into wind power when there are alternatives to butchering Britain, escreve Simon Jenkins, no The Guardian, ontem (realces meus). A sua leitura é obrigatória.
«We know all about life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, but what of beauty? This week hundreds of marchers have converged on Cardiff from the west Midlands and mid-Wales in a desperate bid to halt what, on any showing, is an aesthetic travesty. By what right?
The protested plan, which has seen the Welsh marches in uproar for six months, is to erect 800 more wind turbines across the Cambrian Mountains and build a 100-mile network of 150ft pylons over the Powys hills, down the upper Severn valley into Shropshire. It will turn the largest wilderness area of Britain outside a national park into hundreds of square miles of power station. There is no market demand for this and the electricity generated will be less than one conventional power station. It is all political. The entire project is financed by the taxpayer in grants and by a compulsory levy on electricity bills´.
One thing I know about the green energy debate is that it brings out the worst in everyone, especially landowners and lobbyists wallowing in government money. To the Treasury, wind farms are like aircraft carriers, cash-eating machines pampered so ministers can walk tall at international conferences. Villages are being bribed with £20,000 a year in pocket money if they support permission for local turbines. Farmers can retire to the Bahamas on the amortised value of a wind-farm cluster. The British Wind Energy Association (now euphemised as RenewableUK) has 550 corporate members who shared £1bn in subsidy last year. The press treats it as a research source, when it is a lobbyist.
Leia o resto do artigo.Just 19 giant turbines outside Swansea are planned to generate £12m a year for the Duke of Beaufort's estate, of which £7m is direct subsidy. This is repeated across the British landscape. Then in April came the absurdity of Scottish landowners being given almost £1m in compensation for not supplying wind power to an overloaded grid for just one night. It indicates what happens when an artificial market is created by a political whim, in this case that the UK should generate "15% of power from renewables" with no concern for cost. That cost is budgeted to be a staggering £100bn in grants and price levies by 2020. These sums are way out of proportion to any conceivable public good (...)»
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário