Checking five facts from the Mail on wind power
The Daily Mail’s article ” Coalition at war over wind farms” yesterday was illustrated by a collection of bullet point facts about wind power, referencing the Mail’s extensive back catalogue of articles on the subject. The Mail is not in favour of wind power.
As the ‘facts’ cut across much of the current debate about wind power, we have taken a look at them in some more detail. So how do the Mail do? It’s a bit of a mixed bag. Here are the five statements, where they come from, and whether they’re right:
“A typical turbine generates power worth £150,000 a year but attracts subsidies of £250,000, with costs passed on through higher bills”
We have found it hard to identify where this claim – which has been made previously in the Mail and has been frequently repeated in anti-wind literature – originates from. It was stated in the foreward to a report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in March, but not referenced.
Wind turbines do get substantial subsidies, but figures from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) don’t seem to agree with this statement. Calculations shared with us by DECC indicate that a typical onshore wind turbine, generating 4.73 gigawatt hours per year, would generate electricity worth about £250,000 and attract subsidies worth about £200,000.
This is revenue, not profit. DECC adds:
“…the [Mail’s] statement â?¦ only looks at the revenue side of power generation (i.e. value of electricity output and value of support) and is therefore misleading. It does not consider the costs (capital or operating costs) associated with generating this level of output and which the support costs attempt to address to help incentivise renewable deployment.”
“Critics claim turbines metered by that National Grid run on less than 20 per cent of their capacity for more than half of the time”
Wind is a more unpredictable source of energy than fossil fuels, as the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Conservation organisation The John Muir Trust launched a report last year concluding that wind power in the UK generated at less than 20 per cent of its maximum capacity for more than half of the study period (from November 2008 to December 2010).
Probably the most balanced thing to say about this figure is that there is other evidence to consider.
Website Full Fact investigated the figure when the Mail and Express reported on it. Full Fact points out that the data used for the analysis includes only about half of total UK wind power generation. It excludes some onshore wind farms, and all offshore wind. According to statements made by DECC and RenewableUK at the time, the wind farms used in the analysis were predominantly located in Scotland. Assessing wind output across a wider geographical area could give different results by evening out the variability of wind power.
Full Fact and DECC also say that the figures may be skewed by the inclusion of wind turbines that are newly added to the grid, but not yet generating power.
Load factor is a measure of how much electricity a turbine generates, expressed as a percentage of how much it could generate, if it generated at full power all the time. DECC says the overall onshore wind load factor is about 25 per cent in England and Wales, 28 per cent in Scotland and 33 per cent in Northern Ireland.
Load factors for onshore wind were lower during 2010 as a result of there being lower wind speeds and less rain. This chart shows load factors for wind power as a whole (onshore and offshore) over the last few years, highlighting the 2010 was a low point:
Image - Screen Shot 2012-11-02 At 11.44.03 (note)Source: Department for Energy and Climate Change, Regional Renewable Statistics
For comparison, according to government statistics, the average load factor for a typical gas turbine in 2011 was 47.8 per cent.
“Every home in Britain would be expected to pay £88 to build a vast network of pylons under a £22 billion project planned to link wind farms to the National Grid”
The Mail first made this claim in July. The figures are taken from an announcement by Ofgem – but the Mail misinterpreted them.
Ofgem believes that a planned upgrade of the UK’s energy transmission systems – which consumers will pay for through a payment added to their energy bills – will cost £22 billion in total.
The money is to pay for a combination of changes, including upgrading the electricity transmission grid, and renewing and ensuring the safety of the gas network. In other words, the money is not solely the cost of building pylons to connect wind farms to the grid.
We concluded that a more accurate conclusion from Ofgem’s numbers would be that upgrading the electricity network – which will enable connecting wind farms up, as well as proposed new nuclear plants – will cost a household £32 over the next eight years.
“Wind farm operators were paid £34 million last year to switch off turbines in blustery conditions”
Electricity can’t be stored in large quantities. As energy demand fluctuates, the National Grid therefore has responsibility for ensuring that demand matches supply by requesting more or less power from electricity generators.
National Grid does this by making ‘constraint payments’ to generators in order to compensate them for reducing or increasing their output. In order to decide how much power station is paid, power stations make a ‘bid’ reflecting what they are willing to be paid – or to pay – to be taken off or moved on to the network.
National Grid told us that it made constraint payments to wind farms worth £34 million last year. It added:
“The overall total cost for balancing the GB network in the 2011-12 financial year was £823m. This includes total constraints payments to all generators of £324m.”
So in 2011/12 constraint payments to wind farms represented just over ten per cent of the total – the rest of the payments go to coal and gas plants. It is worth pointing out that wind farms produce less than five per cent of our electricity (see below) so the payments they are getting are out of proportion to the amount of electricity they generate.
RenewableUK argue that wind has ended up receiving more payments because wind turbines are easier to turn on and off than other kinds of power plant. But wind turbines can also be turned off because they are producing too much power during high winds.
The government is currently consulting on a ‘ Transmission Constraint Licence Condition‘ that would essentially limit constraint payments.
“Wind farms provided 3 per cent of the electricity supply last year and contributed £548 million to the economy”
Statistics from DECC show that over the course of 2011, renewable power contributed 9.4 per cent of total electricity generation in 2011 – or 34,410 GWh. Total electricity generation was 368,000 GWh.
Wind power as a whole contributed 15,750 GWh – which is 4.3 per cent of the total, not 3 per cent. Onshore wind was responsible for 10,372 GWh or 2.8 per cent of total electricity generation.
A spokesperson for RenewableUK said that its figures show that last year wind farms contributed £621.9 million ( see p.14 and 15) to the economy – somewhat more than the Mail’s figure of £548 million. But we haven’t looked at these figures in detail.
So there you have it – it’s definitely not the Mail’s worst effort. But as ever, the facts and figures are a lot more interesting when you look at what lies behind them.