However it is still unclear as to what communities can claim to help them install renewable energy projects.  Although the European Commission has said that grant recipients should not be eligible to receive the FIT, the latest DECC advice is that in some cases both grants and FITS can be claimed without breaching State Aid rules.

According to DECC, if a public organisation who has received a grant before 1st April 2010 for a renewable energy installation commissioned between 15th July 2009 and 31st March 2010,  it could be eligible for FIT payments in the following scenarios:

1) Recipients of publicly funded grants who comply with the EU’s rules on ‘de minimis‘ aid. To be de minimis, public funding, including funding from FITs, must not exceed €200,000 (around £160,000) over a period of three years.

2) Non-standardised costs are additional costs incurred as a result of measures taken to reduce the environmental impact of a renewable energy installation.  (This also potentially applies to residential claims).

It is however unlikely that communities contemplating bigger projects will be able to secure both significant grant investment and FITS.  DECC is currently preparing a detailed guidance note to provide further clarity.

The Severn Barrage has had numerous advocates from James Lovelock and Tony Blair to the Welsh Assembly. Why is it then that every time the idea is resurrected by a new advocate it rapidly disappears from the headlines to sink back into the mudflats?

The Severn Barrage between Weston in the west of England and Cardiff in Wales would comprise of an impoundment type of structure with over 200 turbines. Professor Roger Falconer at the Water Management School of Engineering, University of Cardiff estimates that the barrage would generate around 8.6 Gigawatts of electricity at peak times and 17 TWh per year. This would provide for the electricity needs of roughly 5% of the UK population. Aside from the benefits of generating clean electricity, the barrage would also potentially reduce flood risk and reduce effluent levels.

Many organisations however bitterly oppose the project including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds due to the lost inter-tidal mud flat habitat which is important for birds.

The UK independent Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) believe that if the barrage is to be built it should be environmentally sustainable. In order to be sustainable it must:

• be publicly led as a project and publicly owned as an asset to avoid short-termist decisions and ensure the long-term public interest

• fully comply with European Directives on habitats and birds i.e. involve the creation of compensatory habitats on an unprecedented scale

The costs of the project both with and without habitat creation are high. Estimates for building the barrage are in the region of £21 billion ($32 billion US) according to government advisers. Furthermore there would be a huge cost in finding and funding land and the creation of over 7,000 hectares of inter-tidal mudflats which would need to be provided in order to compensate for the lost bird habitat.

The SDC believe that further investigations into the environmental opportunity that might exist for combining climate change mitigation with adaptation through a habitat creation package that actively responds to the impacts of climate change over the long term should be carried out.

In January of this year 5 tidal barrage and lagoon projects for the UK Severn Estuary were chosen for a government shortlist including the long – time promoted Cardiff to Weston barrage. A consultation exercise on these proposals closed at the end of April and a second public consultation is to be held (probably in 2010), once the government has all the detailed information on the costs, benefits and impacts of the final short-listed schemes. This will also be before any decision is made by Government on whether to support a Severn tidal power scheme, and if so which one.

It therefore appears that unless land can be found for mudflat creation together with a spare $21 billion of public money, the Severn Barrage will continue to be a re-occurring “brilliant conceptual idea”.

In the UK, renewable energy generators pay to connect and use the grid network as part of an “invest and use” strategy currently operated by National Grid and more local distribution network operators (DNO’s). This incremental strategy will not however be sufficient in the long term and there has been much debate recently as to how we can maximise the use of capacity left in the existing grid network through using technologies such as smart grid, whilst at the same time kicking off the development of new grid infrastructure.

The existing system means that investment in the grid network only happens after so many applications by renewable energy developers for access rights have been made. This has the effect of slowing down the delivery of renewable energy projects. National Grid has suggested various alternatives, including the ‘auctioning’ of grid capacity to renewable generating ‘bidders’. A response to this approach has been subject to much in-fighting within the renewable energy industry – but it is difficult to see how this system would efficiently pay for improvements and would inevitably leave some companies with access rights but (because of planning delays) no renewable energy project to connect into the grid – leaving ‘wasted’ capacity.

There is currently no effective mechanism for building new grid infrastructure and we are stuck in a ‘chicken and egg’ situation i.e. developers need to know they can access grid capacity before spending on renewable energy projects but National Grid need projects to justify building additional grid infrastructure. The Renewable Energy Zone approach put forward in the US recently allowing a right for central government to ’step in’ and enforce grid facilitation by individual states, has not been put forward in the UK, however we are dealing with geographically less challenged country. Notwithstanding this, centralised funding for new grid planning would be a timely step in the right direction.

A sustainable and decentralised energy generation network is key if we are to improve our energy self sufficiency and reduce carbon emissions. The more energy generated close to home, the better. However it is recognised that although this reduces transmission losses, it does leave grid network operators with more and more complex systems to manage. As with everything else in the world – it is all about getting the right balance.

A combination of different, geographically appropriate renewable energy technologies in each country is healthy. In the UK different types of wind energy projects are being built from large offshore wind ‘power stations’ in the sea to small wind farms close to large centres of population. Research and development for wave and tidal is expanding. We are going to have to accept the effects of renewable energy projects on our daily lives – for example the visual impacts of onshore wind farms or some limited ecological effects of tidal projects, if we want locally produced energy that can be connected to the electricity grid network within a reasonable timeframe. We need to accept that there are impacts of going green including effects from new grid transmission lines – as compared with the effects of climate change these pale into insignificance.

Natural England – the government body responsible for protecting nature conservation in England recently initiated a research project to answer the question as to whether wind turbines pose a risk to British bat populations. Despite publishing ‘interim guidance‘ for wind energy projects using some knowledge of bat fatalities at wind farms overseas, very little is known about impacts on bat activity in the UK.

The work to be carried out by a steering group comprising Natural England, DEFRA, Countryside Council for Wales, Scottish Natural Heritage and British Wind Energy Association will involve gathering and reviewing existing information, identifying survey wind energy sites sites and discussing experiences overseas with European and US expert bodies.

Government and wind industry funded bat activity monitoring surveys are then to be carried out at operational wind farms to investigate the level of risk to bat populations.

The surveys are hoped to improve our understanding of bat behaviour around wind turbines, enabling more informed decisions about the siting and design of future wind energy projects.

1) The energy taken to build a wind farm is never “paid back” by the energy produced

Figures for pay back times vary depending on the turbine and wind speeds. A report by Milborrow, ‘Dispelling the Myths of Energy Payback Time’, as published in Windstats, vol 11, no 2 (Spring 1998) gave an average figure of 3-5 months and a more recent study of the 2 megawatt Horns Rev wind turbines in Denmark by The World Steel Association gives a figure of 9 months. The average life of a wind farm is 25 years.

2) Wind turbines are not helpful in the fight against Climate Change

The US is the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide with an annual figure of around 6 billion tonnes and the UK is the 8th biggest emitter (data collected in 2007 by the CDIAC for United Nations). Power stations are one of the biggest carbon emitters so we need to find alternative ways of generating electricity whilst producing less harmful gases.

The production of electricity from wind turbines is clean and sustainable. Wind energy projects in operation do not create harmful greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide or waste products unlike other conventional sources of electricity generation. Wind turbines generate electricity that would otherwise have been generated in power stations, thereby offsetting carbon emissions. How much carbon is offset depends on various factors including the type wind turbine and the type of power station the electricity might otherwise have been generated in. Current figures approved by the UK Advertising Standards Agency for carbon savings are very conservative but are probably the safest to assume at 4000 tonnes carbon dioxide per year per turbine.

3) Wind energy is much more expensive than conventional fossil fuels and nuclear

A 2005 report by the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University predicted a small increase in the cost of electricity likely to result from wind power development – equal to around 2.5% of the average domestic cost of electricity with 10% wind power.

4) Wind turbines only work 27% of the time and are inefficient

A modern wind turbine has the capacity to generate around 2000 kilowatts (kW) or 2 Megawatts (MW). A 2 MW wind turbine will however generate around 30% of this maximum theoretical capacity resulting in around 5256 Megawatt hours (MWh) generated per turbine per year. On this basis a wind turbine will generate enough green electricity for the average annual needs of around 1100 homes, using an average demand of 4700 kWh per house based on electricity consumption figures from Digest of UK Energy Statistics. Wind turbines usually operate 75-90% of the time – but not at full capacity.

5) Wind energy does not save carbon emissions because back up power stations need to be kept or built and the grid cannot cope with the fluctuations in supply

A report by the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University described the potential impacts of the variability of wind energy generation upon the UK electricity network. It reported that:

• The development of wind power will result in a reduced need for conventional capacity – with wind power supplying 10% of UK electricity, around 3GW of conventional plant could be retired;

• The cost of balancing wind power variability is expected to reduce with improvements in wind power forecasting techniques

A report from the UK Energy Research Centre ‘The Costs and Impacts of Intermittency: An assessment of the evidence on the costs and impacts of intermittent generation on the British electricity network’ (2006) states that ‘it is unambiguously the case that wind energy can displace fossil fuel-based generation, reducing both fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions’. There is no need to provide dedicated “back-up” capacity to support individual generators.

6) We should be looking at energy efficiency, marine, tidal and solar energy instead of wind energy

People need to use energy much more efficiently and there are many small actions you can take to do this such as boiling less water in the kettle and using energy efficient light bulbs. However this is not enough on its own. All renewable energy sources provided 4.98% of the electricity generated in the United Kingdom in 2007, 0.43 % higher than in 2006. There is however a huge energy gap that needs to be filled as fossil fuels run out. Renewable energy cannot fill this gap on its own but it certainly has to be part of the solution.

Wind energy is a fundamental part of the energy mix and it is playing an increasingly important role in renewable energy generation across the world. It would be disastrous to prevent the build out of technologies such as wind energy that offset harmful gases and are financially and technically successful. Notwithstanding this more funding should be put into the more expensive technologies such as marine and tidal energy and micro-renewables to try and find solutions to the technical and capital cost issues that are currently preventing their roll out.

In terms of solar energy, the technology is much more suited to the domestic scale market for hot water heating and countries with more hours of sunshine such as the US. The UK has the largest wind resource in Europe – it is completely logical that wind energy is utilised as the key renewable energy source. In countries where there is good potential for any of these technologies – as much should be utilised as possible.

7) Only offshore wind energy is viable

Offshore wind usually has a higher potential capacity factor due to higher wind speeds out at sea. However there are negative aspects such as ‘out of action’ timescales being longer due to the need for vessels to get out to the wind turbines and greater electrical losses due to the increased lengths of grid connection. On this basis it should not be automatically assumed that offshore turbines will generate more electricity. At almost double the price of on-shore wind, and with large projects involving huge capital sums, investors are usually more cautious about funding offshore wind and so strong government support is necessary.

As with different kinds of technologies we also need both on and off-shore wind technology to help fill our energy gap.

8 Wind energy projects harm house prices

The evidence base in the US shows the opposite. House prices close to wind farms in some areas rose at a higher rate than the regional average. In the UK the evidence is not sufficient to come to definite conclusion, however what we can say (and indeed the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors say) is that from the research carried out so far, wind farms do not appear to have any discernable impact on property prices and that other variables have more of an impact.

9) Wind farms kill birds and other animals

The RSPB in the UK supports a significant growth in offshore and onshore wind power generation.

A leaflet put together by the RSPB says that many species could lose their habitat to climate change – resulting in a huge drop in the number of birds. Moreover, a recent report published in the journal Nature confirmed that the greatest threat to bird populations in the UK is climate change For this reason they are supportive of wind energy. If wind farms are not located in areas used by birds prone to colliding with tall structures, impacts should be very low.

Poorly sited old wind farms have however caused some major bird casualties in Tarifa and Navarra in Spain, and the Altamont Pass in California. There are specific reasons why these wind farms are unusual including the use of steel lattice towers at Altamont Pass (where birds may try and nest). No environmental impact assessment was carried out, the wind farm comprises 4000 turbines and is in an area important for a number of birds of prey.

Wind farms can be kept away from bat flight routes and impacts on other animals and plants are virtually negligible as long as habitats are avoided. You don’t have to dig up a badger set to install a wind turbine – just move the turbine foundation to a safe distance.

Overall wind energy projects usually enhance habitats for protected species by providing some extra funding for schemes such as hedgerow restoration.

10) Wind farms are noisy and cause ill-health

Wind energy operation does not cause harmful emissions, pollutants or waste products. In response to the occasional unsubstantiated press or website post that wind turbines emit high doses of infrasound and cause associated health problems, Dr Geoff Leventhall, Consultant in Noise Vibration and Acoustics and author of the Defra Report on Low Frequency Noise and its Effects, says: “I can state quite categorically that there is no significant infrasound from current designs of wind turbines. To say that there is an infrasound problem is one of the hares which objectors to wind farms like to run. There will not be any effects from infrasound from the turbines.”

The Daily Mail even went as far as saying that the UFO beings were smart to damage the wind turbines because the devices interfere with the scenic beauty of the countryside. “Proof at last … aliens in UFOs are far more intelligent than we are”. Maybe it was Daily Mail reading vandals?

After a week of silence on his blog, Ecotricity’s Dale Vince speaks out on Zero Carbonister to clarify that although he believes in intelligent life out there, they are unlikely to have accidently crashed into a wind turbine – unless of course turbines emit some kind of infrasonic noise which attracts alien craft. I can just hear this new wind farm myth at my next wind energy project exhibition.

The blade was of course not missing but found at the bottom of the turbine and potential causes of the damage are listed as ice, lightning, collision (including UFO and cows), material failure, design failure and maintenance failure.

Material or maintenance failure are the reasons chosen as the most likely candidates with the results of testing still eagerly waiting from German manufacturers Enercon. It sounds as though Enercon might not be looking after its fleet of wind turbines as well as it could do.

A report from the UK Energy Research Centre ‘The Costs and Impacts of Intermittency: An assessment of the evidence on the costs and impacts of intermittent generation on the British electricity network’ (2006) states that ‘it is unambiguously the case that wind energy can displace fossil fuel-based generation, reducing both fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions’.

The report aims to understand and quantify the impacts of variable generation, and therefore addresses the question ‘What is the evidence on the impacts and costs of intermittent generation on the British electricity network, and how are these costs assigned?’ It is based on a review of over 200 international studies, with the review process overseen by an expert group and the final report peer-reviewed by international experts.

Wind energy generation does mean that the output of fossil fuel-plant needs to be adjusted more frequently, to cope with fluctuations in output. Efficiency may be reduced as a result.

The vast bulk of electricity in Britain is supplied through market arrangements via contracts of varying durations between generators and suppliers of electricity. Relatively small, but crucial, adjustments are needed to ensure demand and supply balance each instant – this is known as system balancing.

System balancing entails costs which are passed on to electricity consumers. Intermittent generation adds to these costs. For penetrations of intermittent renewables up to 20% of electricity supply, additional system balancing reserves due to short term (hourly) fluctuations in wind generation amount to about 5-10% of installed wind capacity. Globally, most studies estimate that the associated costs are less than £5/Megawatt hour (MWh) of intermittent output, in some cases substantially less. The range in UK relevant studies is £2 – £3/MWh.

Unless there is a large amount of responsive or controllable demand, a system margin is needed to cope with unavailability of installed generation and fluctuations in electricity requirements (e.g. due to the weather). Conventional plant – coal, gas, nuclear – cannot be completely relied upon to generate electricity at times of peak demand as there is, very approximately, a one-in-ten chance that unexpected failures (or “forced outages”) in power plant or electricity transmission networks will cause any individual conventional generating unit not to be available to generate power. Even with a system margin, there is no absolute guarantee in any electricity system that all demands can be met at all times.

Intermittent generation increases the size of the system margin required to maintain a given level of reliability. This is because the variability in output of intermittent generators means they are less likely to be generating at full power at times of peak demand. The system margin needed to achieve a desired level of reliability depends on many complex factors but may be explored by statistical calculations or simplified models. Intermittent generation introduces new factors into the calculations and changes some of the numbers, but it does not change the fundamental principles on which such calculations are based.

The amount by which the system margin must rise in order to maintain reliability has been described in some studies as “standby capacity”, “back-up capacity” or the “system reserves”. But there is no need to provide dedicated “back-up” capacity to support individual generators. These terms have meaning only at the system level.

The total ‘costs of intermittency’ are made up of additional short-run balancing costs and the additional longer term costs associated with maintaining reliability via an adequate system margin. Intermittency costs in Britain are of the order of £5 to £8/MWh, made up of £2 to £3/MWh from shortrun balancing costs and £3 to £5/MWh from the cost of maintaining a higher system margin. For comparison, the direct costs of wind generation would typically be approximately £30 to £55/MWh. If shared between all consumers the impact of intermittency on electricity prices would be of the order 0.1 to 0.15 p/kWh.

These estimates assume that intermittent generation is primarily wind, that it is geographically widespread, and that it accounts for no more than about 20% of electricity supply. At current penetration levels costs are much lower, since the costs of intermittency rise as penetrations increase. If intermittent generation were clustered geographically, or if the market share were to rise above 20%, intermittency costs would rise above these estimates, and/or more radical changes would be needed in order to accommodate renewable energy.

In summary – yes there are effects from intermittent sources of energy such as wind, however this does not mean dedicated power stations to “cover” for wind energy as every source of energy requires an alternative to share the risk of break downs. Furthermore wind energy is efficient and does result in carbon dioxide savings.

A recently published report by Salford University confirms that this phenomenon has occurred at 4 wind farms out of 126 and may be occurring at a further 8 in the UK. Exactly what the cause of the effect is appears uncertain however the issue appears to have been resolved through wind turbine control at all sites in the UK, except one, where investigations continue.

To try and help stop the confusion, here are the facts:

1) A modern wind turbine has a maximum capacity of around 2000 kilowatts (kW) or 2 Megawatts (MW)
2) There are 8760 hours in a year (365 days x 24 hours)
3) A 2 MW wind turbine will generate around 30% of its maximum theoretical capacity resulting in 5256 Megawatt hours (MWh) generated per turbine per year
4) Taking all of the above into consideration a wind turbine will generate enough green electricity for the average annual needs of around 1100 homes, using an average demand of 4700 kWh per house based on electricity consumption figures from Digest of UK Energy Statistics

Wind turbines usually operate 75-90% of the time – but not at full capacity.

For further information this British Wind Energy Association web-page is helpful.

Picture above taken from www.science.nationalgeographic.com