'Chris Huhne demonstrated again last week his breathtaking unfitness to run Britain’s “energy and climate change” policy. Addressing a conference of RenewableUK, the chief lobby group for the wind industry, he won a big hand for attacking “the climate sceptics and armchair engineers” (such as me) who continually point out the futility of his infatuation with windmills. Then he reeled off various factual errors, to confirm once more that he hasn’t a clue what he is talking about.
He said that electricity demand rises to “a high of 80 gigawatts every day”. But if he looks at the fifth chapter of his own department’s Digest of United Kingdom Energy Statistics, he will see that only very occasionally does demand scrape above 60GW. He also claimed that “10 per cent of our electricity capacity is renewable”. His ministry’s figures show that he exaggerated this by more than 60 per cent.
Most tellingly, his use of that weasel word “capacity”, rather than “output”, hides the fact that last year the output of our 3,500 windmills put together averaged 1.16GW – less than is generated, unsubsidised, by a single large gas-fired power station, at only a fraction of the cost.'
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