Wind Power

Imagine a wind turbine so big that it would take Usain Bolt 19.32 seconds to run across the 200m diameter of its blades (before plunging tragically into the sea). This is what wind manufacturer Dong says will help bring the cost of offshore wind down to below that of new gas-fired power stations (the size of the blades, not Bolt’s premature demise).

Today we’ve exposed explosive evidence of the lengths to which some Conservative Party MPs will go to sabotage progress on climate change. We’ve uncovered a plot to dismantle the Climate Change Act and one Tory MP involved in trying to manipulate a by-election to push his own anti-wind agenda.

Thursday we issued a zombie warning – we had concerns that armies of undead arguments were likely to crawl from their graves onto ITV’s ‘Tonight: the real cost of going green’. Did you spot any?

Well, perhaps not entire armies - ITV were a bit more sensible than we expected. And they were a lot more sensible than the Panorama crew who based a whole documentary on a KPMG report on the costs of renewables, which they never actually saw, and which KPMG have now decided not to release. Overall, Tonight was relatively even-handed. Perhaps the KPMG fiasco has taught the media to be a bit less trusting of dubious pronouncements on green energy. 

Nevertheless, a few zombies did manage to sneak under the wire.

Great news - Britain's wind farms generated record levels of power on Monday, providing 5 per cent of all power supplied to the National Grid over the course of the day.

The Grid confirmed that 40.5GWh out of a total 809.5GWh was provided by wind farms over the 24-hour period, with wind output peaking at 1,860 megawatts at 8.30pm.

A National Grid spokesperson said that, including direct output from turbines not conected to the grid, "about 10 per cent of total electricity demand would have been met by wind power. It is a pretty big landmark for the industry."