By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Only Miliband could say we need more developments like this!
Ed Miliband’s flagship wind farm has already been paid close to £2.5 million to keep its turbines switched off, The Telegraph can reveal.
Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, praised the Viking wind farm in the Shetlands, which officially opened on Thursday, saying “hundreds of thousands of homes” across the country would benefit from “cheap, home-grown energy”.
He said the development, the UK’s largest onshore wind farm, “shows why we need more developments like this to make Britain a clean energy superpower”.
SSE, which operates Viking, promised that it would be Britain’s “most productive” onshore wind farm. But figures from the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) show 62 per cent of its output has had to be discarded in its first month.
Dr John Constable, the director of the REF, said: “The paradoxical outcome is that wind farm developers actually make more money when they are paid to reduce output rather than when they are selling normally on the market. The British consumer is being ripped off, and developers are laughing all the way to the bank.
“All you hear from Ed Miliband is that more renewable energy will make energy cheap – but unless he deals with the constraint payment programme, that is simply an illusion.”
Dr Constable said it would “certainly not save people money on their electricity bill” if wind farms continued to be paid huge sums of money to keep turbines off.