Catch The Wind

By Cernig

If there's anything even remotely close to this project going on in the US, I'm unaware of it.

Eleven sites around the English, Scottish and Welsh coastline have been earmarked as suitable to house ranks of giant wind turbines. It is the latest phase of an ambitious scheme to meet more of the UK's energy needs from natural and sustainable sources.

The Government is committed to obtaining 20 per cent of all its energy from renewables by 2020 and offshore wind power has been identified as the key factor in reaching the target.

The UK is about to overtake Denmark as the world's largest generator of wind power and within five years we will be able to obtain as much power from wind as we do from nuclear plants.

Announcing the potential new sites the Crown Estate - which is responsible for managing the sea bed - said it will play a much bigger part in getting wind farms up and running in time to meet the 2020 deadline.

It will meet up to 50 per cent of the start up costs of new farms by helping developers get through complicated planning processes and with sourcing suitable turbines and getting them hooked up to the electricity grid.

Bidding for the new sites - round three of a long-term plan to increase the number of offshore wind farms - will begin almost immediately and contracts could be signed as early as next year.

If all the new farms are built it will more than triple the 8GW of power being developed offshore under rounds one and two of the scheme to 25GW and eventually up to 33GW which would be enough to theoretically provide enough power for every home in Britain.

Somehow I doubt the UK is appreciably windier than the Northern coasts of North America. Nor is Iraq appreciably sunnier than parts of the US South, yet the US military uses solar powered street lighting in Iraqi reconstruction programs that it seems can't be installed on a large scale here. Even the cloudy UK and Germany are more advanced in their thinking about solar power.

Does anyone have any idea how much power, and therefore oil, might be saved by switching to renewable resources on a European scale for public lighting etc? Twenty per cent of national energy needs would be rather more than could possibly be gained by drilling in ANWAR, for example.

If it's true that America must reduce it's addiction to oil, and it certainly seems to be, then what better place to begin? You could certainly make an argument that national security outweighs the costs of investment in the new lights. It even decentralizes essential infrastructure, making it less vulnerable to terror attacks on power stations. What's for a Republican not to love about this green idea? Could it be that those who are just fine with spending trillions on foreign adventurism aren't interested in actually spending money to bolster national security here at home because their corporate backers wouldn't like it?