{"id":33260,"date":"2015-10-20T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33260"},"modified":"2015-10-19T23:41:06","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T03:41:06","slug":"the-economics-of-wind-power-in-the-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/20\/the-economics-of-wind-power-in-the-uk\/","title":{"rendered":"The economics of wind power in the UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Delingpole<\/a> on the sleight-of-hand employed by the media to pretend that wind power is far more economical than it really is:<\/p>\n

Wind power now UK\u2019s cheapest source of electricity \u2013 but the Government continues to resist onshore turbines.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

That was the headline in the Independent<\/em> this time last week. I\u2019m not suggesting for a moment that you\u2019re an Independent<\/em> reader but suppose for a moment you were: what do you think your reaction might have been?<\/p>\n

Mine, I suspect, would have been not dissimilar to that of the eight thousand readers who decided it was worth sharing \u2013 and indeed that of the two or three who used it to needle sceptics on Twitter.<\/p>\n

\u201cTake that, evil deniers!\u201d I would have gone in my smug, Independent<\/em>-reading way. And it would never have occurred to me to question the premise for a number of reasons.<\/p>\n

1. It was written by the Environment Editor on a reasonably well-respected national newspaper. And people with responsible jobs like that don\u2019t make shit up, do they?<\/p>\n

2. The data came from Bloomberg New Energy Finance \u2013 \u201cthe world\u2019s leading provider of information on clean energy to investors, energy companies and governments.\u201d Well if they say so it must be true. Bloomberg \u2013 they\u2019re kind of a big deal in financial information, right?<\/p>\n

3. It wasn\u2019t just the left-leaning Independent that ran with the story. The story also appeared in the Guardian<\/em> which, though also pretty parti-pris<\/em> where environmental issues are concerned, does tend to pride itself on its accuracy and integrity (relative, say, to its arch-enemy the Murdoch press) and its willingness to rectify even the slightest mistake in its Corrections section. And more significantly, it ran in the unashamedly free-market City Am<\/em> which, you might have imagined, would never dream of writing a headline like \u201cWind power now the cheapest electricity to produce in the UK as the price of renewable energy continues to drop\u201d without first checking to see whether the press release was accurate.<\/p>\n

Well, since the story ran, Paul Homewood has been doing a bit of homework. And guess what? Yes, that\u2019s right. Wind power isn\u2019t the cheapest source of electricity in the UK or anywhere else in the world. Not by a long chalk. It\u2019s at least twice the price, for example, of electricity generated from that hated but remarkably cost-effective fossil fuel, gas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Delingpole on the sleight-of-hand employed by the media to pretend that wind power is far more economical than it really is: Wind power now UK\u2019s cheapest source of electricity \u2013 but the Government continues to resist onshore turbines. That was the headline in the Independent this time last week. I\u2019m not suggesting for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,25,28],"tags":[640,213,51],"class_list":["post-33260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-economics","category-media","tag-alternativeenergy","tag-newspapers","tag-pr"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Es","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33260"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33261,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33260\/revisions\/33261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}