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They claim that subsidies should be drastically cut and draft planning guidance strengthened to make it easier for objectors to block wind farm schemes.

The letter, organised by Daventry MP, Chris Heaton-Harris, says it is ‘unwise’ to support ‘inefficient and intermittent’ onshore wind power and the forthcoming National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) should be beefed up to make it easier to oppose wind farm applications.

Quelle surprise! In the main, the Tories are a coalition of climate change sceptics – like former chancellor Nigel Lawson – and rural romantics who see a wind turbine on a hillside or stretch of coastal horizon as butchery of the landscape.

Despite the fact that 60 per cent of voters think it is ‘right’ to ‘subsidise wind farms to encourage more use of wind power’.

It certainly isn’t a rational belief about the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of wind power. Far from being ‘intermittent’ wind turbines operate between 70-80 per cent of the time, currently providing power for the equivalent of 3.3 million homes.

Indeed, as Conservative energy minister Charles Hendry has put it:

“Onshore wind is one of the most cost-effective and developed of all renewable technologies, and has almost zero marginal cost, because once the facilities have been constructed, the cost of the energy – the wind – comes without charge.”….

Wind farms are not to everyone’s visual tastes, but to talk about them ‘destroying the environment’ is so far wide of the mark as to be laughable. By far the most commercially viable form of renewable energy, which can easily be scaled up, wind is vital to Britain’s strategic energy interests….
By turning their noses up at wind power Tory MPs serve to make us more reliant on nuclear and imported energy sources with all the associated price spikes and reliability problems. With the looming crisis in Iran and the continuing uncertainty in Russia and the Middle East, such a policy is an abdication of our national interest.

And also a snub to jobs. Our burgeoning wind power industry already employs 10,000 people at every level from apprentices to experienced engineers.

As Jennifer Webber from RenewableUK puts it:

“The number of jobs is expected to rise to 88,300 by 2021, including the many companies, large and small, involved in the supply chain.”

That is an eight-fold increase in jobs over the next decade.

Chris Huhne may have had his faults, but as energy secretary he managed to keep the crackpots and nimbys on the Tory backbenches at arm’s length. Let us hope his successor, Ed Davey, will do likewise. http://www.leftfootforward.org/2012/02/climate-change-sceptics-and-rural-romantics-%E2%80%93-the-tories-are-a-shambles-on-renewable-energy/