THE WINDS of change are blowing over energy generation in Britain. Turbines are springing up in their hundreds with the government promising thousands more will follow. For the short-term at least, the wind will be granted every opportunity to demonstrate its role in satisfying Britain's future energy demands.
Symbolically, the first official speech of Malcolm Wicks, Tony Blair's seventh energy minister in eight years, was devoted to stressing the importance of wind, a statement timed to massage the confidence of a fledgling industry preparing for its greatest period of expansion to date. Wicks reiterated the government's commitment to ensuring that by 2020 a fifth of Britain's electricity would come from renewables and that wind would form a major component.
Hundreds more turbines in 18 new wind farms will be switched on by the end of the year. Enough applications are moving through the planning process to suggest 7 per cent of the nation's energy demands will be met by wind by 2010. Already the UK is poised to become the world's biggest producer of power from offshore wind farms.
But behind the hyperbole, the jury remains divided on the long- term potential of wind. Its political backing is under scrutiny amid an increasingly rancorous debate that turbines are despoiling some of Britain's best-loved landscapes. Questions, too, surround the inherent characteristics of wind, with critics arguing its fundamental vagaries make it too unreliable to keep Britain's lights on. At present about one per cent of the UK's energy is provided by wind. Others claim because of wind's inconsistent nature, wind energy will never be cost-effective. Even those in the industry have admitted that turbines only supply 30 per cent of their 'installed capacity'.
Yet at the heart of wind's future, one central question continues to dominate; should Britain be preserving its landscape or saving society from climate change? Is the disruption of some of our most cherished views a worthwhile price to pay for a renewable energy that could tackle global warming? It is a dilemma that has pitted pro-turbine environmental against conservation bodies who maintain Britain's landscape is king.
A wider issue, though, must also be considered. How will Britain power itself later this century when the ageing nuclear power stations and coal-fired plants - both of which contribute almost half of the UK's energy needs - shut down during the next two decades? Certainly a part of Britain's future energy mix will be made of wind - after all Wicks has promised another 2,000 turbines, a growth buoyed by generous government subsidies that ensures profits for companies involved. Most will be built offshore or in remote areas in Wales and northern England, along with Scotland and outlying islands like the Shetlands.
Advocates also claim that advances in technology guarantees that wind energy is getting cheaper all the time. A recent report by the government's Sustainable Development Commission was hailed by the industry as a breakthrough because it showed wind power was becoming price competitive with other fuels.
While onshore generation currently costs 3.2p a kilowatt hour, the wholesale price of electricity is 3p. The study also found that technology also makes it possible to predict falling supply, answering critics who argued that wind energy's intermittency required back-up power to be available to make up for sudden shortfalls. The commission concluded that the additional cost of making up for intermittency is just '0.17p per kilowatt hour when there is 20 per cent wind power on the grid'.
While this is positive news, progress must be maintained. Later this year the industry faces a review of government energy policy, and needs to demonstrate that it will be able to fulfill its obligations as a secure, competitive energy source. Yet wind's advocates still have to win over the conservation lobby, which claims even a handful of whirling turbines are so visible and distracting that just a few can ruin an entire landscape.
It is a concern bolstered by a number of other charges put forward by the anti-wind lobby over the last decade or so. Falling property prices, the whirring noise that makes people sick a mile away and the grisly deaths of kites and golden eagles, even if their numbers are a fraction of those of birds that are killed on the roads, have all been advanced by a vocal opposition.
Recently critics began claiming that the great selling point of wind energy, a clean way of tackling global warming, is overplayed and that it can only lower greenhouse gas emissions by a few per cent. Electricity generation accounts for only a third of emissions: transport and industry produce the rest, they argue.
For all the column inches devoted to the furore over the windfarm site at Whinash on the edge of the Lake District national park, its turbines could only hope to save 178,000 tons of carbon emissions a year. By contrast, a jumbo jet flying daily from London to Miami and back releases three times that amount.
Such views, however, have fallen on deaf ears with experts at the Sustainable Development Commission, whose influential report was unequivocal in its insistence that wind power must be made to work in Britain if Blair's hopes of tackling the threat of global warming were to succeed. It also claimed that, by 2020, onshore wind power would be the cheapest form of electricity generation.
Recent designs for wind turbines enable them to produce electricity efficiently. If the government is serious about its commitment to generating 10 per cent of electricity from renewable sources by the end of this decade, then wind farms remain the most efficient means of achieving that goal. Yet as the opponents argue the merits of wind, one outcome is unavoidable. Regardless of their aesthetic merits, Britain's countryside will be changed by global warming.
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