It appears that there is some major movement in that direction, at least.
John Hayes, newly appointed energy minister said that we can “no longer have wind turbines imposed on communities” and added that it “seems extraordinary” they have allowed to spread so much throughout the country.
“We have issued a call for evidence on wind. That is about cost but
also about community buy-in. We need to understand communities’ genuine desires. We will form our policy in the future on the basis of that, not on a bourgeois Left article of faith based on some academic perspective.”
“If you look at what has been built, what has consent and what is in the planning system, much of it will not get through and will be rejected. Even if a minority of what’s in the system is built we are going to reach our 2020 target,” Mr Hayes said. “I’m saying enough is enough.”
Any honest assessment of wind energy will spell doom for the industry. One only has to look to Suyts Space to know this. (Hank provides an excellent analysis here.) But, the cost effectiveness of wind energy is documented throughout the web. It is a horrible waste of resources and produces next to nothing towards the need of reliable energy for our grid.
This is a remarkable turn around on this issue. Back in 2008, when Prime
Minister Gordon Brown announced his wish to see the country spend £100 
billion on windfarms, the only response from the Tory leader David Cameron was to say that he should have done it sooner.
Now, the Brits have Hayes saying “enough“, joining in the chorus with George Osborne their Treasury Chancellor.
I’d say if these people remain in power, wind in the U.K. is dead. Good for them. The response from the EU should be precious.
Beautiful line —– “faith based academic perspective“.
h/t John Droz
suyts space 
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
The full energy generation details, for each source of electricity for the UK, are available via http://www.geog.ox.uk~dcurtis/NETA.html. This gives some good graphics which illustrate the difference between sources very simply, with the predictable patterns. It also provides a link to “Raw historv data” as a zipped .csv file, ALL_neta_30.zip. This turns out to be an Excel file. It covers Jan 2010 to the current date and gives values for each source at half-hourly intervals. I have downloaded this and have done some analytical work including assorted standard statistical calculations, and quite a lot of graphics. As an example of some very simple numerics, WIND (sic) provided about 3.56% of the UK’s electrical energy demand over 2012 up to 22nd October, when the wind farms had reached a plated capacity of about 5000 megawatts. The actual average output was 1253 megawatts, around 20% of the plated capacity, compared with the TOTAL generation which averaged 35194 megawatts. Multiplying these power values by 7080 gives the electrical energy totals for the UK over this period.
If the politicians bothered to look at this practical stuff they would immediately see the total folly of building yet more windmills. Perhaps Mr Hayes has already done this simple exercise!
That’s exactly right. It doesn’t take much to conclude wind is one of the silliest ways to generate energy. It’s why it was abandoned in the late 1800s.
see also
David MacKay
http://www.withouthotair.com/
Even though he is a warmist and UK climate change advisor he shows the ludicrous numbers of renewable energy contraptions necessary for a switch to renewables objectively.
Robin again! A slip of the pen resulted in 20% being quoted instead of 25%. Sorry.
Germany is at 17%.
I would be very grateful for some directions about how to access the data from Germany, Dirk. The 17% you quote is roughly what I’d heard or read some time ago, so I was a bit surprised to find the higher value for the UK.
Sorry, can’t find my source. It was a report 2 years ago by some federal or university institute. interestingly, the average load factor went down over 5 years – this could have been caused either by building more and more wind turbines in less suited places, or a speculative effect of weak sun / global cooling.
Here is real time data for part of the electricity grid of Germany
http://notrickszone.com/2012/04/24/the-german-energy-blog-and-50hz-sites/#comment-95056
Hello, Dirk, I’ve collected some data from your first reference, for the early part of 2010,, but it’s very uninformative!. I can plot the column “Value” against time – or its proxy Row Number – but this simply shows great variability ( its coeff of variation was > 100%, as expected I suppose for wind power), and three well defined regimes, identified by plotting its cusum The distribution of “Value” approximated a Weibull with a shape parameter of 0.91 and a scale parameter 1500. Not really much else to comment on. Perhaps the later url will be a bit more enlightening!
Cheers, Robin
Here’s a current report by a Fraunhofer institute detailing wind/ solar energy production vs. other sources. They don’t give you the load factor directly but they tell the max capacity in W and the number of Wh produced per week/month by the contraptions. That should allow to determine the load factor.
Click to access stromproduktion-aus-solar-und-windenergie-2012.pdf
Found that report via
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windenergie#Deutschland
(Attention, most of the external links point to reports by German wind energy lobby. Fraunhofer is honest, though)
The wind turbines plastered all over Ireland, the UK, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Germany are one of the monuments dedicated to the EU’s 20:20:20 agenda, decided during the merry days when they also decided to become the world’s most competitive region in 2010 (see how that one worked out), and when Global Warming was their most important problem.
Broke Portugal and Spain have more wind power per capita than Germany (eco-obsessed since Hitler). Portugal even had the first commercial (subsidized) wave power plant (for 2 months, then it broke and was never repaired).
It’s all over. They’ll all bail.
I hope people study this colossal global blunder in the history books of the future.
Windmills have their positive aspects though –
as these monstrosities are so bad at supplying continuous power to the various national grids of the EU, a back-up supply must be maintained. Well cheap US coal has come to the rescue of Germany, UK, Spain,…. and lots of old coal-fire generator plants are being fired-up with it.
The EU’s loss is the US’s gain.
Well, that’s true, but I’d rather burn it here for electric and use our nat gas for heating and cooking. But, yes, our exports of coal are dramatically climbing!
Ahh, but now you’re being logical again.
I have those attacks now and again. 🙂
Have now looked at the Fraunhofer pdf with its abundant graphs, but unfortunately it doesn’t provide the sort of data that I would deem interesting and testable! Perhaps I’m being picky but I really like to see output data in numerical format, so that I can apply some techniques that they’ve not thought of.
Robin