Wind Turbines (Minimum Distance from Residential Premises) Bill [HL]
Debate between Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne and Lord Teverson
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
My Lords, I rise to support the noble Lord, Lord Reay, in the excellent Bill he is putting before this House, to support its committal and to thank him most warmly for the effort he has put into creating the Bill. This is a very important topic indeed, and I believe it has been underresearched, underdiscussed and, perhaps, underdebated.
I shall explain my interest. My colleagues behind me will be surprised to hear me speaking on wind farms and on energy when some of them have spent most of their political lives thinking about these important topics and I have apparently not done so. That is not precisely the case. My initial constituency, Blyth in Northumberland, drew my attention very seriously to fossil fuels. It is one of the great coalmining constituencies, but unfortunately I did not win it. I was then selected by Torridge and West Devon. The noble Lord, Lord Reay, has already mentioned a very important case that arose in my constituency when I was a Member of another place: the Holsworthy wind farm case. In the European Parliament, in which I subsequently served, I sat on an important European Union/US climate change scientific committee for several years and, as a result of that experience, I gladly accepted the invitation from the noble Lord, Lord Lawson of Blaby, to join the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and I declare that interest today.
I shall turn first to the important point on which this Bill rests, which is the separation of wind farms and human habitation by a precise measurement. I also serve as vice-president of the pre-eminent school for deaf children and young people in the United Kingdom, the Mary Hare School just outside Newbury, where I was brought up. I have a lot of knowledge and experience about human hearing. First, I wish to focus on why the premise on which this Bill is based is so profoundly right. I recently asked the House of Commons Library to extrapolate for me the statistics available on problems of human hearing in the British public. According to the House of Commons Library, something like 27 per cent of the British population has hearing problems. There may not immediately seem to your Lordships' House to be an absolute correlation with the potential difficulties caused to human hearing, which have already been mentioned by a number of noble Lords, but that is not so. Every year 400 babies are born profoundly deaf in the United Kingdom and a vast number of young people now have induced hearing loss but that does not, alas, give them a fundamental protection from pain, distress and psychiatric problems caused by noise. In fact, it is a curious fact that quite often the loss of human hearing or its failure to develop in the womb creates a much higher sensitivity in the brain. I do not know enough about it to understand the connection. All I can say is that when a noise drills through the brain, that is perhaps where the hearing should have been, and it causes immense pain. The fact that one-third of noble Lords should by rights perhaps be seeking some hearing enhancement from technical devices would not mean that the noble Lords in question could not feel pain despite the fact that they could not hear the noise in a normal sense.
My attention was drawn to this problem by another case, in North Tawton in my then constituency. A retired man with very acute hearing had pain from the noise that emerged. It came from a long way away from his retirement home, but it hurt his head. It was absolutely clear. The hospital tests showed that it was the case. I merely make the point that the fact that people cannot hear does not protect them from pain and acute psychological distress. If you penetrate the brain with harmful noise, you upset people very much indeed. That gentleman and others like him—he was certainly not unusual—experience great physical difficulties through accessing parts of the brain that should be left alone unless it is through our normal hearing mechanisms.
On top of that, I saw from the case in Holsworthy that the general population was extremely distressed. I accept that over the border in Cornwall things may be different, but I hae ma doots, dear colleagues and friends—very large doots—because my experience is that people mind very much indeed about the persistent noise. It is painful, it is harmful and, as I said a few moments ago, it has a bearing on noise-induced hearing loss. It is the easiest thing of all to bring about in babies and young children, in whom the delicate mechanisms of the ear are still developing. These can be readily damaged. In most young people it happens because of discotheques, jazz concerts and so on where the noise is at too high a level, but it is all too easy to damage babies and young people by noise.
I shall touch on a point briefly, although there is much more to say. Why has this not been raised by the National Health Service? Noble Lords may not be aware that the NHS does very little indeed on hearing. Of the total professional medical training provision for doctors in the United Kingdom, only five days out of the seven years of training are spent on the human ear. The National Health Service is very unlikely to have an understanding of this, other than in bits and pieces.
One or two noble Lords have said that the population is comfortable with wind turbines, but we are discussing the spending of taxpayers’ money. I believe that when taxpayers know the truth about the subsidies that wind turbines have attracted, they will not be at all comfortable that their hard-earned income is being spent in this way. It is an unhappy fact that wind farms are almost entirely subsidised by a complex yet hidden regime of feed-in tariffs, tax cuts and preferential tax credits. A typical turbine generates power that is worth around £150,000 a year, but attracts subsidies of more than £250,000 a year. These subsidies are of course added directly to consumer bills on the premise that the consumer pays. The cost to consumers of the renewables obligation scheme has risen from £278 million in 2002 to more than £1 billion in 2009, which is a total growth of £4.4 billion over seven years. Ofgem predicts that the total cost to consumers of the renewables obligation between 2002 and 2027, when the scheme is set to end, will amount to a staggering total of £32 billion. I cannot believe that consumers would be happy if they fully understood this.
An analysis of wind patterns in the United Kingdom suggests that at high penetration levels here, wind generation offers a capacity of between 10 and 20 per cent, which in itself is an indicator of how much of the capacity can be statistically relied on to be available to meet peak demand. It compares with around 86 per cent for conventional generation. This means that fossil fuels and other thermal or hydro power still have to be available as a back-up in times of high demand and low wind output if security of supply is to be maintained. I therefore make the point that new conventional capacity will still be needed to replace the conventional and nuclear plant which is expected to close over the next decade or so, even if large amounts of renewable capacity are deployed. To put it plainly, this means that every 10 new units’ worth of wind power installation has to be backed up with some eight new units’ worth of fossil fuel generation. This is because fossil fuel sources will have to power up suddenly to meet the deficiencies of wind. Wind generation does not provide an escape route from fossil fuel use, but embeds the need for it. Nuclear fuel runs at base load and therefore cannot power up to cover the absence of wind.
Lord Teverson
I thank my noble friend for giving way. That energy prices go up as a result of renewables is clearly a concern of us all, but does she not agree that the cost of renewables is almost insignificant in comparison with the increase in the cost of gas and oil, which has put up the real bills of consumers hugely? It is that supply pinch on fossil fuels that has caused the explosion in cost to consumers.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
My noble friend’s argument might hold water if wind power or the other alternative renewables were able to provide the 86 per cent of our energy that conventional fuels provide. Since conventional fuels have to back up renewables, I cannot give credence to his argument. Conventional fuels have to be around to back up the intermittent wind power that is all we get in the United Kingdom. I happen just to have spent the Recess in Oklahoma, just down the road from cyclone country. It is very different there. I was blown so hard in the street one day on my way to the conference I was attending that I almost fell over. How very different that is even from the Isle of Lewis, with its unique rock, and the Isle of Man, with its trembling granite—another unique feature of the United Kingdom.
I cannot accept that wind power offers a decent alternative to fossil fuels. Of course, fossil fuels, as my noble friend has immediately pointed out, are themselves expensive, which is why I have always backed nuclear fuel as the only really sensible, long-term solution for the United Kingdom.
I say again that I am enormously grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Reay, for bringing about this important debate. I am immensely unhappy that our intermittent wind power has attracted such monstrous subsidies. Largely, of course, I am unhappy because it has been kept away from the consumer, for it is ultimately consumers who will have to tell us how they wish to go. There is enormous unhappiness about the wind farm programme. The chair of energy policy in the Parliament of one of our closest allies in the European Union, Denmark, calls the Danish wind programme a terribly expensive disaster. I support the Bill.