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Down on the Farm (an extract from “Private Eye”)
Among those celebrating when Gordon Brown recently announced his £100bn green energy” package, including plans to build 3,000 more wind turbines across Britain’s countryside, were hundreds of farmers whose eyes lit up at the thought of sharing in the bonanza.
The wind companies have already been besieging landowners whose property might provide suitable sites for these lucrative monsters. The fact that the government is now taking new powers to railroad them through the planning process regardless of local objections only makes the prospect more alluring.
Just how attractive a proposition leasing out land can be to a cash-strapped farmer can be seen
from a letter recently sent out to farmers by Scottish Power Renewables, promising them “the chance to make millions”. For each two megawatt turbine the company will pay £10,500 a year for 25 years, so the reward for allowing a 10-turbine wind farm on your land could work out at £2.6m - all for no work other than putting your signature on the contract.
Elsewhere landowners have been offered as much as £ 17,000 a year for having just one turbine on their premises, equating to an income over 25 years of £425,000. What the wind merchants are careful not to tell the farmers, however, is how much they themselves can hope to earn from these.
Although a two megawatt turbine, up to 350ft high, generates on average only a quarter of its capacity - due to the variability of the wind -thanks to the government’s subsidy system this will earn its owner some £450,000 a year. At current prices, £230,000 will come from selling the electricity to the grid. But the developer also receives a further £218,000 from the government’s “renewables obligation”, which compels our electricity suppliers to buy all the power generated from wind, paying that much on top of its normal price, which is then passed on to the rest of us when we pay our electricity bills.
This is the secret which the wind companies are anxious not to reveal to the farmers whose land their machines stand on. It means that for each turbine, the developer will be making considerably more money each year than the landowner can hope to make in a quarter of a century. By the time a farmer who has a two megawatt turbine in his fields has made his £425,000, the wind company will have been able to put £11m in the bank - in return for an initial outlay of some £2m, plus yearly maintenance costs, all of course tax deductible.
And the benefit for the taxpayer who is funding all this? Last year the 2,000 wind turbines already built in Britain generated between them less electricity than a single gas-fired power plant, and much less than a nuclear power station. Even the 7,000 additional turbines Brown boasts of building (including those offshore) will produce less electricity than the Drax coal-fired power station in Yorkshire.
For any wide-eyed farmer who thinks of how much they themselves can hope to earn from cashing in on the wind bonanza, meanwhile, another factor to bear in mind is that he is not likely to win the affection of many of his neighbours. When a windfarm scheme in Norfolk last year tore the local community apart, one unfortunate farmer involved became so depressed by the bitterness it aroused he was found dead in a ditch. It’s a heavy price to pay for helping to save the planet.