More Subsidies For "Cheap Renewables"

Ministers have announced another vast transfer of money from poor taxpayers to wealthy windfarm operators. The scale of the gift, once again, almost defies belief:

Energy minister Claire Perry is ­expected to announce today that after a 10-year period of progress in the ­offshore wind industry the Government is ready to offer another decade of certainty to developers.Ministers will hold contract auctions every two years from next May through to the 2020s to award the £557m they have set aside to support the lowest cost offshore wind projects.“Depending on the auction prices, this could see 1-2GW of new offshore wind [energy] every year in the 2020s – powering millions more homes a year,” she was expected to say.

The UK's 20GW of wind turbines are currently generating 1.94GW of electricity, just 5% of demand. In other words they are operating at just 10% of capacity. So if Claire Perry's half a billion pounds of subsidy doubles our windfleet capacity, as is implied by the numbers above, in similar weather conditions it would get us up to 10% of demand.As someone observed in response to the announcement today, the lunatics are in charge of all the UK's major political parties. It's hard to disagree with that assessment.