Sunday Telegraph 7:40AM GMT 05 Feb 201210

Full letter from MPs to David Cameron on wind power subsidies
More than 100 MPs have written to the Prime Minister demanding cuts to the £500 million a year subsidies paid to the wind power industry.


The Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
LONDON, SW1A 2AA
30th January 2012


As Members of Parliament from across the political spectrum, we have grown more and more concerned about the Government’s policy of support for on-shore wind energy production.

In these financially straightened times, we think it is unwise to make consumers pay, through taxpayer subsidy, for inefficient and intermittent energy production that typifies on-shore wind turbines.

In the on-going review of subsidy for renewable energy subsidies, we ask the Government to dramatically cut the subsidy for on-shore wind and spread the savings made between other types of reliable renewable energy production and energy efficiency measures.

We also are worried that the new National Planning Policy Framework, in its current form, diminishes the chances of local people defeating unwanted on-shore wind farm proposals through the planning system. Thus we attach some subtle amendments to the existing wording that we believe will help rebalance the system.

Finally, recent planning appeals have approved wind farm developments with the inspectors citing renewable energy targets as being more important than planning considerations. Taken to its logical conclusion, this means that it is impossible to defeat applications through the planning system. We would urge you to ensure that planning inspectors know that the views of local people and long established planning requirements should always be taken into account.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Heaton-Harris (CON), Daventry
Christopher Pincher (CON), Tamworth
Nadine Dorries (CON), Mid Bedfordshire
Karen Bradley (CON), Staffordshire Moorlands
Steve Baker (CON), Wycombe
David Davis (CON), Haltemprice and Howden
Matthew Hancock (CON), West Suffolk
Richard Bacon (CON), South Norfolk
David Nuttall (CON), Bury North
Bernard Jenkin (CON), Harwich and North Essex
Dr. Daniel Poulter (CON), Central Suffolk and North Ipswich
Anne Main (CON), St Albans
David Mowat (CON), Warrington South
Karen Lumley (CON), Redditch
Nadhim Zahawi (CON), Stratford-on-Avon
Natascha Engel (LAB), North East Derbyshire
Pauline Latham (CON), Mid Derbyshire
Sarah Newton (CON), Truro and Falmouth
Geoffrey Cox (CON), Torridge and West Devon
Brandon Lewis (CON), Great Yarmouth
Adam Holloway (CON), Gravesham
Damian Collins (CON), Folkestone and Hythe
David Morris (CON), Morecambe and Lunesdale
Graham Brady (CON), Altrincham and Sale West
Louise Mensch (CON), Corby
Robert Walter (CON), North Dorset
Aidan Burley (CON), Cannock Chase
Bob Blackman (CON), Harrow East
Nick De Bois (CON), Enfield North
Steve Brine (CON), Winchester
Robert Syms (CON), Poole
Caroline Nokes (CON), Romsey and Southampton North
Brian Binley (CON), Northampton South
Steven Barclay (CON), North East Cambridgeshire
Julian Lewis (CON), New Forest East
Lorraine Fullbrook (CON), South Ribble
Tony Cunningham (LAB), Workington
Christopher Chope (CON), Christchurch
Dan Byles (CON), North Warwickshire
Edward Leigh (CON), Gainsborough
Richard Harrington (CON), Watford
Jacob Rees-Mogg (CON), North East Somerset
Guto Bebb (CON), Aberconwy
Kris Hopkins (CON), Keighley
Iain Stewart (CON), Milton Keynes South
Mark Spencer (CON), Sherwood
John Stevenson (CON), Carlisle
Bill Cash (CON), Stone
Andrew Griffiths (CON), Burton
Simon Hart (CON), Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire
Peter Bone (CON), Wellingborough
Charlie Elphicke (CON), Dover
Justin Tomlinson (CON), North Swindon
Mark Pawsey (CON), Rugby
Stuart Andrew (CON), Pudsey
Marcus Jones (CON), Nuneaton
Alun Cairns (CON), Vale of Glamorgan
Richard Drax (CON), South Dorset
Martin Vickers (CON), Cleethorpes
Craig Whittaker (CON), Calder Valley
Bob Stewart (CON), Beckenham
Adam Afriyie (CON), Windsor
Jack Lopresti (CON), Filton & Bradley Stoke
James Wharton (CON), Stockton South
Julian Sturdy (CON), York Outer
Heather Wheeler (CON), South Derbyshire.
Nigel Mills (CON), Amber Valley
Simon Reevell (CON), Dewsbury
Mark Reckless (CON), Rochester and Strood
Paul Maynard (CON), Blackpool North and Cleveleys
Jeremy Lefroy (CON), Stafford
Jackie Doyle-Price (CON), Thurrock
Philip Hollobone (CON), Kettering
James Clappison (CON), Hertsmere
Sammy Wilson (DUP), East Antrim
David Tredinnick (CON), Bosworth
Roger Williams (LIB DEM), Brecon and Radnorshire
Nicholas Soames (CON), Mid Sussex
Graham Evans (CON), Weaver Vale
Douglas Carswell (CON), Clacton
Patrick Mercer (CON), Newark
Rory Stewart (CON), Penrith and The Border
John Glen (CON), Salisbury
Mark Pritchard (CON), The Wrekin
Caroline Dinenage (CON), Gosport
Neil Parish (CON), Tiverton and Honiton
Stephen McPartland (CON), Stevenage
Greg Knight (CON), East Yorkshire
David Ruffley (CON), Bury St Edmunds
Tracey Crouch (CON), Chatham and Aylesford
Priti Patel (CON), Witham
Karl McCartney (CON), Lincoln
James Gray (CON), North Wiltshire
Mark Williams (LIB DEM), Ceredigion
Andrew Rosindell (CON), Romford
Oliver Heald (CON), North East Hertfordshire
Andrea Leadsom (CON), South Northamptonshire
Ian Liddell-Grainger (CON), Bridgwater and West Somerset
Charles Walker (CON), Broxbourne
Andrew Percy (CON), Brigg and Goole
Andrew Bridgen (CON), North West Leicestershire
Andrew Turner (CON), Isle of Wight
Mark Garnier (CON), Wyre Forest
Andrew Bingham (CON), High Peak
Stewart Jackson (CON), Peterborough
Philip Davies (CON), Shipley
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Sunday Telegraph  11th Sep 2011 By Christopher Booker:

Three separate news items on the same day reflected three different aspects of what is fast becoming a full-scale disaster bearing down on Britain. The first item was a picture in The Daily Telegraph showing two little children forlornly holding a banner reading “E.On Hands Off Winwick”.
This concerned a battle to prevent a tiny Northamptonshire village from being dwarfed by seven 410-foot wind turbines, each higher than Salisbury Cathedral, to be built nearby by a giant German-owned electricity firm. The 40 residents, it was reported, have raised £50,0000 from their savings to pay lawyers to argue their case when their village’s fate is decided at an inquiry by a Government inspector.
In the nine years since I began writing here about wind turbines, I have been approached by more than 100 such local campaigns in every part of Britain, trying to fight the rich and powerful companies that have been queuing up to cash in on the vast subsidy bonanza available to developers of wind farms. Having been the chairman of one such group myself, I know just how time-consuming and costly such battles can be. The campaigners are up against a system horribly rigged against them, because all too often – although they may win every battle locally (in our case we won unanimous support from our local council) – in the end an inspector may come down from London to rule that the wind farm must go ahead because it is “government policy”.
I long ago decided that there was little point reporting on most of these individual campaigns, because the only way this battle was going to be won was by exposing the futility of the national policy they were up against. My main aim had to be to bring home to people just how grotesquely inefficient and costly wind turbines are as a way to make electricity – without even fulfilling their declared purpose of reducing CO2 emissions.
Alas, despite all the practical evidence to show why wind power is one of the greatest follies of our age, those who rule our lives, from our own politicians and officials here in Britain to those above them in Brussels, seem quite impervious to the facts.
Hence the two other items reported last week, one being the Government’s proposed changes to our planning rules (already being implemented, even though the “consultation” has scarcely begun) which are drawing fire from all directions. The particular point here, on page 43 of the Government’s document, is a proposal that local planning authorities must “apply a presumption in favour” of “renewable and low-carbon energy sources”.
What this means in plain English is that we can forget any last vestiges of local democracy. Our planning system is to be rigged even more shamelessly than before, to allow pretty well every application to cover our countryside with wind turbines – along with thousands of monster pylons, themselves up to 400 feet high, marching across Scotland, Wales, Suffolk, Somerset and elsewhere to connect them to the grid.
All this is deemed necessary to meet our EU-agreed target to generate nearly a third of our electricity from “renewables” – six times more than we do now – by 2020. This would require building at least 10,000 more turbines, in addition to the 3,500 we already have – which last year supplied only 2.7 per cent of our electricity.
Obviously this is impossible, but our Government will nevertheless do all it can to meet its unreachable target and force through the building of thousands of turbines, capable of producing a derisory amount of electricity at a cost estimated, on its own figures, at £140 billion (equating to £5,600 for every household in the land).
Which brings us to the third of last week’s news items, a prediction by energy consultants Ulyx that a further avalanche of “green” measures will alone raise Britain’s already soaring energy bills in the same nine years by a further 58 per cent.
A significant part of this crippling increase, helping to drive more than half Britain’s households into “fuel poverty”, will be the costs involved in covering thousands of square miles of our countryside and seas with wind turbines. The sole beneficiaries will be the energy companies, which are allowed to charge us double or treble the normal cost of our electricity, through the subsidies hidden in our energy bills; and landowners such as Sir Reginald Sheffield, the Prime Minister’s father-in-law, who on his own admission stands to earn nearly £1,000 a day at the expense of the rest of us, for allowing a wind farm to be built on his Lincolnshire estate.
Even more damaging, however, will be the way this massive investment diverts resources away from the replacement of the coal-fired and nuclear power stations which are due for closure in coming years, threatening to leave a shortfall in our national electricity supply of nearly 40 per cent. If we are to keep our lights on and our economy running, we need – as the CBI warned in a damning report on Friday – urgently to spend some £200 billion on power supply,
But our politicians have been so carried away into their greenie never-never land that they seem to have lost any sight of this disaster bearing down on us. Instead of putting up turbines on the fields of Northants, E.On should be building the grown-up power stations we desperately need. But government energy policy has so skewed the financial incentives of the system that the real money is to made from building useless wind farms.
Sooner or later, this weird policy will be recognised as such a catastrophic blunder that it, and the colossal subsidies that made it possible, will be abandoned. That will leave vast areas of our once green and pleasant land littered with useless piles of steel and concrete, which it will be no one’s responsibility to cart away.
If the Government really wishes to make a useful change to our planning laws, it should insist that every planning permission to build wind turbines should include a requirement that, after their 25-year life, they must be removed at their owners’ expense. Alas, by that time the companies will all have gone bankrupt, and we shall be left with a hideous legacy as a monument to one of the greatest lunacies of our time.

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Two recent press articles - first from The Scotsman on the ramifications of Germany's decision to phase out nuclear power; and then from The Guardian on the appalling consequences of the 'Localism' Bill - the title of which is directly contrary to its effect, which would be to force local councils to agree to almost any application for development.

Germans are braced for blackouts: Scotsman 31 August 2011

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

GERMANY is importing huge amounts of nuclear-generated electricity from France following its decision to abandon atomic power in the wake of Japan's Fukushima disaster.
But it is still bracing for blackouts of the kind not seen since the Second World War as overnight eight of the country's 17 reactors were switched off in a populist move that is now seen as a rash decision.
The government's official plan is to retire the remaining nine reactors by 2022 and power the country without nuclear energy, instead relying on growing renewable energy sources.
But domestic customers and companies are nervous about whether their lights and assembly lines will stay up and running this winter, and economists and politicians are arguing over how much prices will rise.
Joachim Knebel, chief scientist at Germany's prestigious Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, said: "It's easy to say, 'Let's just go for renewables,' and I'm quite sure we can someday do without nuclear, but this is too abrupt."
He described the government's shutdown decision as "emotional" and pointed out that, on most days, Germany has survived this experiment only by importing electricity from France and the Czech Republic, which generate much of their power with nuclear reactors.
Juergen Grossmann, chief executive of the German energy giant RWE, which owns two now-closed reactors in Biblis, about 40 miles south of Frankfurt, said: "Germany, in a very rash decision, decided to experiment on ourselves. The politics are overruling the technical arguments."
Germany's planners believed they could forgo nuclear energy in large part because of the country's remarkable progress in renewable energy, which now accounts for 17 per cent of its electricity output, a number the government estimates will double in ten years. On days when the offshore wind turbines spin full tilt, Germany produces more electricity from renewable sources than it uses.
With a total of 133 gigawatts of installed generating capacity in place at the start of this year, "there was really a huge amount of space to shut off nuclear plants," Harry Lehmann, a director-general of the German Federal Environment Agency said of the plan he helped develop.
The country needs about 90.5GW of capacity on hand to fill a typical national demand of about 80GW a day. So the 25GW that nuclear power contributed would not be missed - at least within its borders.
To be prudent, the plan calls for the creation of 23GW of gas- and coal-powered plants by 2020 as renewable plants don't produce nearly to capacity if the air is calm or the sky is cloudy.
German energy companies say they have been handed a national energy template that looks good on paper but is technically challenging. Although the country's production of energy is bounteous, they say it is not always available where and when it is needed.
Northern Germany has offshore wind and coal deposits, but southern Germany - a manufacturing centre home to carmakers Mercedes, BMW and Audi - has no plentiful local fuel source other than nuclear. Germany's current grid is highly decentralised, lacking high-voltage transmission lines to move electricity over long distances.
"Now, with the nuclear shutdown, we have a very difficult task," said Joachim Vanzetta, head of transmission system operations at Amprion, the largest of the country's four grid operators.
Germany's hope that gas and coal plants will temporarily replace some of the lost nuclear generation may be hard to fulfil - power companies remain lukewarm about building them, especially given the policy of buying "clean" energy first.
"Few operators will be willing to build a power plant in a form that may ultimately only run a couple of hundred hours a year," Mr Grossman of RWE said. 

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Simon Jenkins guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 July 2011 21.00 BST

 
'Direct action from a new army of Swampies may soon be conservation's only defence'. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
With parliament in recess the government this week sneaked out the most astonishing change to the face of England in half a century. A "national planning policy framework" replaces all previous regulation and encourages building wherever the market takes it, crucially in the two-thirds of rural England outside national parks, green belts and areas of outstanding natural beauty. Farms, forests, hills, valleys, estuaries and coasts will be at the mercy of a "presumption in favour of sustainable development". The "default response" to any planning application is to be "yes".

The word sustainable should never appear in an act of parliament. It is a weasel word, an adjective not qualifying a noun but lightly dusting it with vague political approval. Sustainability is the sort of Blairism that gave us downsizing for sacking and humanitarian intervention for war. The only sustainable meadow is a meadow. Sustainable development is a contradiction in terms. It means development.

The localism bill now before parliament is a straight developers' ramp. Drafted by the local government secretary, Eric Pickles, and the business secretary, Vince Cable, it stresses business and "national economic policy" over conservation at every turn. It is the outcome of intense lobbying by the construction industry. Pickles and Cable are mere purveyors of building plots to the capitalist classes. The words development and business occur in the bill 340 times, the word countryside just four.

The bill and addendum breach the core principle of planning, that the long-term use of land, the scarcest of resources, should take precedence over an owner's right to profit. That is why there are no bungalows on the white cliffs of Dover and no wind farms on the Chilterns. It is why, when you look out over the Severn valley, you do not see Bristol merged with Gloucester.

Great champions of the countryside, such as Octavia Hill, Oliver Rackham, Clough Williams-Ellis and Marion Shoard, sought a regime in which rural England kept its head above the tide of urbanisation. Protection was embodied in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and a presumption, given the irreversibility of urbanisation, against building on green land.

I have read parliamentary bills all my life, but the localism one is the most wretched capitulation to a single lobby I know. It is a junk heap of cliche. It asserts that building must be allowable "for prosperity … for people … and for places". It need only be economically, socially or environmentally sustainable – "components to be pursued in an integrated way, looking for solutions which deliver multiple goals", whatever that means. Development need only show it is "planned and undertaken responsibly". There is no definition of "responsibly". Such vagueness puts every rural acre in play as "worth a try".

Planning, once proudly independent, is now effectively an arm of Cable's department. It is told that it "must not act as an impediment to growth". This stands on its head the purpose of planning, which is to guard the public interest irrespective of market forces. Its whole point is to be an impediment.

Under the bill the old upper-tier regional targets and spatial strategies are scrapped, with local authorities to write new ones based on what "local people" want. These are to be guided by parish councils and "business forums". The latter can be any group of 21 people who "live or work" locally. These shadowy, self-selected people are charged not with ascertaining local opinion, but with allocating plots for building and even promoting "more development than is set out in the local plan". In particular they must help "deliver" a 20% increase in land available for housing.

Should a neighbourhood be so reckless as to want to protect its environment, the planning authority is obligated to "meet local development needs" with "sufficient flexibility to respond to rapid shifts in demand". This confusion of need and demand is an elementary economic howler.

Worse follows. Half the councils in England have no strategy plans at all. In this case, planning approval is to be assumed. It is also to be assumed "wherever the plan is silent, indeterminate or where relevant policies are out of date", a stunning Orwellian phrase.

This bill is philistine, an abuse of local democracy and an invitation to corruption. Its impact statement accepts that local electors may "resist development proposals that are not in line with their aspirations", in other words they may opt for conservation. Yet when developers appeal, inspectors are told that their duty is to concede on grounds of overriding national policy. The bias is shameless.

Two groups, apart from developers, will benefit. One is planning lawyers, who will be rubbing their hands in glee and saluting St Eric and St Vincent. The other will be a new army of "Swampies", who will defend rural England with the same anarchy as Pickles is attacking it. With the countryside facing a return to the ribbon-and-sprawl of the 1930s, litigation and direct action will be conservation's only defence.


There is no argument that planning is too slow. That does not justify throwing out baby, bath water and all. There is no evidence that a shortage of green land is impeding growth. House-builders and hypermarkets already hold large land banks. There is no "need" to build on green-field sites anywhere in Britain. There is merely a "demand" from those wishing to profit from it.

There is now probably more developable land left over from manufacture and lying unused in England than ever in history. It is mostly serviced, with infrastructure, housing, schools and a working population to hand. By definition it is more sustainable than virgin countryside. It is there that planning should direct development.

Countryside needs no sentimental defence. Most Britons find it beautiful and want it preserved. When the Chipping Norton set see what they have unleashed on their rolling acres they will doubtless be appalled. But we are back to the NHS, forests and student fees, to ministers in a hurry being exploited by lobbyists on the make.

This time it really matters. For the unprotected countryside to become the lasting victim of the credit crunch is tragic. Vince Cable last week patronised America for being in thrall to "a few rightwing nutters". So is he.

Link to the Bournemouth, Dorset & Poole Renewable Energy Strategy paper:

www.dorsetforyou.com/402620

LETTER TO DORSET COUNTY COUNCIL:

From: BC Trueman OBE Hillside Cottage,
Cucklington,
Somerset BA9 9PT.
01747 841014
brian@cucklington.plus.com
23rd August 2011.

Councillor IA Campbell,
County Hall,
Colliton Park,
Dorchester DT1 1XJ.



DRAFT BOURNEMOUTH, DORSET & POOLE RENEWABLE ENERGY STRATEGY

Many thanks for your letter AC/MB/cw dated 11th August 2011. I appreciate the trouble you have taken to respond to the points made in my original letter.. However, I’m afraid that I and my colleagues in Save the Vale still have some concerns, as follow:

· First, may I repeat a couple of quotations, which would appear to define the paper as a ‘strategy’ and thus, perhaps inadvertently, incorporate it into the planning guidelines The first is from your own Council Plan and Targets for 2010-2011’, which specifically states: ‘74. Implement the Bournemouth, Dorset and Poole Renewable Energy Strategy (my underline) and action plan through the Dorset Energy Group and its working groups.’
The second is from the Daily Telegraph, although expressing a view that has been reported in most of the papers: ‘the Draft National Planning Policy Framework will change the current planning rules so that any applications that fit with "local development strategies" drawn up by councils will automatically (my underline) be given consent.’ Thus we find it hard to understand your assurance that this is no more than a consultation.
· On consultation with the public – I really feel that there hasn’t been any meaningful consultation. None of the groups which I know to be active in this area with regard to wind turbines appears to have been present at the consultation ‘event’, apart from CPRE – who themselves have taken the trouble to brief us and others. There has to date been a complete absence of media coverage. And a survey to which fewer than 600 people responded is hardly wide ranging. We are pleased that the consultation period has now been extended, and very much hope that this time can be used to get a genuine debate going – starting with much wider press coverage.
· To say that the document has been publicised on your website is of course true. However, I suspect that not many members of the public scour your website regularly in the hope of finding something useful! And I have to say that, until you sent me the link directly to the strategy paper, it was remarkably hard to find – I have had calls from several parish councils asking for guidance!
· It is depressing to read the comment that renewable energy (in this case predominantly onshore wind) would improve energy security. It is becoming increasingly obvious that onshore wind is by a long way the least cost effective way of producing electricity. Because of its intermittency and unpredictability, it needs a near 95% (OFGEM figure) back-up from an immediately available conventional generation system, usually gas. I maintain a rather nerdish daily watch on the amount of power generated by all the power sources in the UK, and the contribution from the ‘fleet’ of just under 3500 wind turbines varies dramatically. For long periods during last winter, the coldest on record, wind contributed 0.2% or less – and several times the contribution was so low as to register 0%. And, while the power requirement in the UK can be predicted with great accuracy by the grid operator and conventional power stations programmed to meet it, the contribution of wind is obviously unpredictable. Not, then, much energy security, and as regards cost, wind farms simply would not exist without the subsidies from ROCs. And as regards employment, most onshore turbines are imported and once installed offer next to no employment opportunities.
· We don’t want to be entirely negative in our response. We wonder why some fairly simple steps cannot be taken to reduce harmful emissions. Why does every new building not have to be fitted with solar or PV panels? The additional cost would be negligible. My own solar panels have reduced my annual oil consumption by about half. Why are we still wastefully burning town and road lights all night? And why are we not investing in tidal power which, unlike wind, would be entirely predictable? The concentration on wind in an area of the country not noted for being windy is hard to understand: Ecotricity in its recent application for turbines at Silton chose to use UK national average wind speeds rather than those obtained from its own anemometer mast. And, finally, biomass is becoming much more efficient and it would be encouraging if it were accorded a much greater role in your plans.

In short, we are concerned that, if adopted, this strategy paper would inevitably lead to a major change in planning assumptions for our area, and this with, to date, minimal public involvement.

Yours sincerely,

Brian Trueman.