“Renewable energy is the way forward, IF you are prepared to pay and pay and pay. And be ready for the lights to go out.

No one would build wind farms without the government subsidies - that's according to the chief exec of EON.

Let's face it, we've made a mess of our energy policy, and our energy use. Now the plan is to desecrate rural areas with wind turbines to get out of the mess. That might be justifiable if there was any good evidence that the wind turbines help, but most of the supporting 'evidence' seems to come from the companies who stand to make vast amounts of money from the wind farms.

In fact, the most interesting information actually comes from the likes of EON, i.e. the big energy companies who are in it for the long haul and who have some interest in getting right rather than the horde of cowboys who just want to build a windfarm for the fast money. When you look at some of the stuff coming out of the big players, they make statements such as only 8 percent of the installed wind capacity could be relied on for peak winter load. OK, that 8% is just EON's view. Elsewhere I have seen estimates as high as 15%, but the point is this is a seriously low number. What does it mean? If you install 100MW of wind turbines, and assume the more generous 15% figure, then you have to have 85MW of conventional (gas, coal, nuclear) just waiting to take over in the winter. You can't use it for anything else. It's like carrying a spare can of petrol for the car, except these back-up powerstations will have to be kept running, ticking over at minimum efficiency on their lowest power output until they are needed.

I have just been reading an article where the energy minister, Chris Huhne, extols the virtues of wind power. The trouble is, when you read carefully, all the important bits are left out. It's all clever sound-bites with no substance - sorry, I know he's a politician and I shouldn't expect anything better. My favourite Huhneism is that wind farms are "incredibly competitive" - but there is no mention of what they are competitive with. The last time I looked, electricity from wind is three times more expensive than gas or nuclear. That is not what I would call competitive. That's why wind power needs all those subsidies.

Perhaps the scariest notion (Chris Huhne seems to like this one) is the idea that wind power will give us 'energy security'. This is apparently important because much of our energy comes from unstable parts of the world. Not nearly as unstable as the wind, of course, except when we get those incredibly stable anti-cyclones which can sit over the UK and half of Europe for days with windspeed close to zero. Curiously enough, its things like those anti-cyclones which prompt companies like EON to suggest that only 8%-15% of the installed capacity can be relied on for peak winter load.

As a final thought - one of the things which killed the Davidstow project was the objection from air traffic safety : NATS-NERL. The turbines were likely to interfere with the ground to air communications. For all those budding windfarm developers out there, this is a bad one to get wrong. I have read a copy of the letter from NATS-NERL to the planners and it contains what is basically a threat - if the council ignores objections from NATS-NERL then they will take them to court. I have even found that the government planning rules (which emphasise how completely fantastic these windfarms must be) make it very plain that if there is a threat to air traffic safety then the application has to be refused.

Davidstow was never going to work. The developer wasted a lot of time and money, much of that funded by us council tax payers, because they had not resolved the NATS-NERL objection before they made the application. Our glorious Strategic Planning Committee compounded that by not throwing it out when they first considered the application, just like the pro-windfarm plannin”

“People need to start thinking sensibly, forget arguments of we need to stop using as much power as we do - its fantasy, the order of magnitude of the cuts we need to make in order to make up for the generation capacity that is due to go offline in the next 10 years could never happen.

We have 3 options: -

1. Renewable - It is desirable, but unreliable and unproven and requires massive standby conventional generation - Cornwall has probably the best renewable resources in the UK, with massive potential in Wind, Geothermal, Tidal and Solar. We should be encouraging renewables in this county due to these resources which could actually in the long term provide massive industry in the County. Somebody has to prove these technologies, let it be us for once.

2. Coal - As a country we should be encouraging the next generation of Coal Fired stations in Yorkshire, Notts, South Wales and derby. Coal is now comparitively clean when compared to the past, especially if we use our native anthracite as opposed to German and Australian Brown Coal and Lignite - this will provide a massive boost to the economy of the country by re - establishing the coal fields which still have centuries of reserves.

3. Nuclear, there has to be an element of nuclear baseload generation, particularly if we shy away from Coal, these plants should be areas without coal reserves - the South West, South East, North Wales and the West Coast. It is unlikely that one would ever be built in Cornwall as they produce far more power than i needed in the area and the National Grid would have to be massively uprated in the area just to export the power.

We can't just keep saying no to everything that comes up in our back yards. I have mixed feelings about this particular application. In terms of wind generation it was a good application, it made sense. I would have had more respect for the developer if they had been more upfront, basically the development was stopped by the presence of starlings.,”

“or maybe a nice big stinking coal powered fire station instead!

rejecting proposals like this are stupid, we have created a big problem with energy, we need to solve it, Renewable energy IS the way forward!”

“And the likelyhood of Nuclear power stations everywhere gets stronger...........God help us!”