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| Bedfordshire has one of the lowest wind speeds in the country. In 2007 the average wind speed recorded at a height of 10m at the Bedford Meteorological Office surface station was 4.5m/s with the maximum recorded value being just 18.3m/s. |
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Ludo van Halderen,
Chairman of Nuon’s board 2002-2008 |
“While the mechanisms of a single European market are well understood and widely adopted in the agricultural sector, policymakers find it difficult to apply the same concept of making optimal use of each country’s natural resources when it comes to fuel mixes. Europe is still dragging its feet on adopting a single energy market for renewables, in which wind energy would be developed where it makes sense instead of seeing wind farms receiving substantial national subsidies in countries where they run for barely a fifth of the year.” |
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| Piers Guy, NUON Renewables |
“It’s an emotional campaign, it’s about fear and mostly based on complete bollocks frankly, but never mind, facts are not a problem.” |
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| Not one single conventional power station has yet been replaced by the thousands of wind turbines already operating across Europe |
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Ferdinand Fűrst zu Hohenlohe-Bartenstein,
Chairman,
Federal Association for Landscape Protection, Germany |
"Soon we "celebrate" the 20,000th wind plant, without replacing even one single small plant of conventional energy" |
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Hans-Joachim Mengel,
Professor at Berlin University |
"The turbines are the worst desecration of our countryside since it was laid waste in the 30 Years War nearly 400 years ago." |
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Professor Otfried Wolfrum,
- a long-time Friends of the Earth supporter |
"Windpower is a big lie. The windmills sprouting all over our countryside are a giant nonsense." |
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Editorial in Der Spiegal,
influential German magazine |
"The dream of environmentally friendly energy has turned into a highly subsidised destruction of the countryside." |
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| The need for back-up has unfortunate consequences. First, to allow for short variations of wind-power supply, conventional power plants have to throttle back so they produce less electricity. This not only drives up their running costs but is also more polluting - rather like a car stopped at a traffic light. |
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Gundolf Dany,
Chief Engineer,
Institute of Power systems, Aachen, Germany |
"The extra cost of "balance" power in Germany is about €‚500 million a year. Until we invent a way of storing huge amounts of electricity, wind energy can never be relevant to our future." |
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| Dany and other engineers report that wind turbines have an insignificant impact on pollution reduction and in some cases even increase it. Nor is wind energy cheap. All wind factories throughout Europe are fuelled by subsidies of various kinds |
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| DENMARK has nearly 6,000 wind turbines. The Danish Government has now cut subsidies for wind power so drastically that practically no new land based windmills are being built and plans for three more huge offshore windfarms have been put on hold. Denmark imports nuclear power from Finland and Sweden. They pay Sweden to take wind energy when it generates an unused surplus during a particularly gusty wind |
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Henning Ramussen,
Eltra Transmission Company Fredericia Denmark |
"Even if the wind fails to blow for no more than one hour a year we can't afford to shut down existing (non - wind) plants" |
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Niels Gram,
Danish Feration of Industries: |
"In green terms windmills are a mistake and economically they make no sense. Many of us thought wind was the 100% solution for the future but we were wrong. In fact, taking all energy needs into account, it's only a three per cent solution" |
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Jytte Kaad Jensen,
Chief Economist for Eltra,
Denmark's biggest electricity distributor |
In just a few years we've gone from some of the cheapest electricity in Europe to some of the most costly, |
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Aase Madsen, MP,
Chair - Energy Policy in Danish Parliament. |
For our industry it has been a terribly expensive disaster. |
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Flemming Nissen,
Head of Development, Elsam, Denmark |
"Increased development of wind turbines does not reduce Danish carbon dioxide emissions." |
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Peter McGauran,
Australian Federal Agriculture Minister,
former Minister for Science: |
"Wind farms don't live up to the hype that they are an environmental saviour and a serious alternate energy source, and the effects they can have on their neighbours are so serious it means they should not be allowed to get away with the exaggerated claims. Their claims are fraudulent." |
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Congressman Pete Stark
of Hayward, California: |
"These aren't wind farms, they're tax farms" |
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Dr. Howard Hayden,
Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut |
"With the right subsidies, wind could become a viable energy source. And, with the right subsidies, gasoline could be made free, and 2-carat diamonds could be given away in cereal boxes. How is it that wind, with a 4000-year head start, is such a small player in the energy scene? Could it be ( just possibly) that the answer has something to do with physics instead of economics and politics?" |
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Richard Courtney
(Reviewer for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) |
Wind farms are "environmentally damaging money wasters whose large scale use increases power demand. The New Age dream of a world operated by wind farms will remain a dream because the laws of physics do not allow it in an industrialised world. If wind power were economic then oil tankers would be sailing ships". |
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Sir Martin Holdgate
Former Head of International Union for the Conservation of Nature,
(who favours renewable energies in the right place and on the right scale.) |
"The trouble with wind farms is they have a huge spatial footprint for a piddling little bit of electricity. You would need 800 turbines to replace the output of a coal fired power station" |
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