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Britain is producing electricity from wind power to serve all London south of the river, it was announced today.
With the 30-turbine wind farm at Gunfleet Sands off the Essex coast at Clacton going into production this week, the UK now has four gigawatts of generating capacity from wind.
Not only is that enough electricity to power 2.3 million homes — equivalent to half of London or the whole of Scotland — the milestone, says the British Wind Energy Association, puts the UK firmly on track to hitting green energy targets which have been widely rubbished as over-ambitious.
“We are on track to hit the target of 10% of energy in the UK coming from renewables by 2010,” said the association's chief executive Maria McCafferty. “And with the very large capacity offshore schemes coming in from 2015, we should get to the target of 30GW of wind by 2020.”
Wind-powered electricity has grown tremendously. It took the UK 14 years install the first 1GW. The next 3GW took four years with the last 1GW coming on within the last 12 months. The BWEA says a total of 6GW of wind will be installed by the end of 2010 which with 2GW of other renewable energy capacity means 10% of the country's total generating capacity will come from green energy.
The targets, says the BWEA will continue to topple. If all the wind farms currently in construction or with planning are built according to plan, by 2012 there will be 12GW of installed wind capacity meaning the UK will be generating more electricity from wind than nuclear.
Reader views (2)
Just the usual misleading bilge from the BWEA. They were, however, stopped in their tracks recently by the ASA who ruled that the co2 savings claimed for wind power were wrong by a factor of 50%. The new BWEA figures still do not include the amount of co2 produced by the necessary back up for those frequent, non-windy days, or that produced in the manufacture and construction, or come to that the huge amount of co2 that is released by building windfarms on peat bogs. With load factor of 25% the 4Gw of installed capacity claimed by the BWEA nets down to 1Gw, which is about half that from a modern nuclear or conventional power station. Currently the UK electricity consumer is giving the wind industry approximately £2 million every single day in subsidies. This is driving the poor and elderly deeper into fuel poverty. I suggest that 'WL' from London buys a copy of the "Wind Farm Scam" an appropriately named book just released by scientist Dr John Etherington
- Bob Graham, Moray, Scotland, 22/10/2009 08:37
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This is excellent news. I wish the company every success. I just hope any gains in CO2 reduction are not seized by polluting industries such as aviation.
- W.L., London, 21/10/2009 02:57
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