Energy: Wind Farms

Lord Howie of Troon Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howie of Troon]

My Lords, I hesitate to intervene in what is clearly a Welsh evening but I am happy to come to the aid of my fellow Celts on this occasion. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, on securing this debate and on the powerful manner in which he introduced it.

I should say that I have a kind of background in Wales. Older Members of the House, if there are any present, may remember that I spent a lifetime in the construction industry and younger Members should take note of that now. In my civil engineering days I was involved in the Milford Haven power station, in a coal mine near Llanelli, in a gas works near Neath and in the Wylfa nuclear power station in north Wales. I have a background in the energy business, although I was on the construction side of the infrastructure for the industry.

I am with the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, in that I want to widen the debate from the specific mid-Wales aspect. I regard that as a microcosm of what is likely to happen through the rest of the country. Many years ago, as a relatively new Member of the House—I think that Jim Callaghan was the Prime Minister although I am not too sure—I drew attention to my experience with Milford Haven and suggested to the House that if we were to replace the Milford Haven oil-powered station, which produced 2,000 megawatts, we would have required something like 2,000 windmills, as we called them in those days. They have now been upgraded to wind turbines. I said at the time that they would stretch from Cardiff, at roughly every 100 yards, around the coast to the Mersey. The turbines are stronger now and would stretch for only half that distance—but that is the scale that we are talking about. I reminded the House more recently that if you took the Thames array—an offshore assembly that is no longer called a farm but an array—it would stretch from the House here in one direction as far as the Tate Modern and in the other direction as far as King’s Cross railway station. We are talking about covering large swathes of the country with wind turbines, or windmills—call them what you like.

Speaking as an engineer, I would not mind that if they actually produced the energy that they are thought to produce. However, they do not. If one looks back to the coldest day of the winter in December last year, wind power produced 0.04 per cent—I repeat, 0.04 per cent—of the energy required to heat the homes of this country on that day. That figure is derisory. The idea that wind power, which is intermittent, can replace any other form of electricity production is a miasma at best. In order to make up for the periods when windmills are not producing electricity, there has to be a back-up. I refer again to Milford Haven. If we had had the 2,000 megawatts of wind power in Wales that failed, as it happened, last year, one would still have needed Milford Haven power station as a back-up. One would not have replaced it. The idea that windmills will help us is an illusion.

I shall conclude by drawing attention to a book published two years ago by James Lovelock. It is entitled The Vanishing Face of Gaia. He was a guru of Greenpeace at its beginning, but is now thought of as an apostate. We need 70 gigawatts of electricity. He said that the footprint of a nuclear power station producing 1 gigawatt is 30 acres. The footprint for 1 gigawatt of wind power is 1,000 square miles. I tend to giggle at that thought.

I shall not go on any longer, but I should say this. The Minister and the shadow Minister on the Front Bench should get hold of Lovelock’s book and read it. If they read it and apply its message, they would save all the bother in mid-Wales and in the rest of the country as well.