This new energy scandal makes the wind industry look underpaid Last week, when my colleague Richard North and I revealed the Government’s “secret weapon” in the battle to provide back-up for when the wind isn’t turning the tens of thousands of useless wind turbines it hopes to see built, we had no idea what a huge story this is turning out to be. Under its STOR (Short Term Operating Reserve) scheme, the National Grid has been signing up, at vast expense, thousands of diesel-driven stand-by generators to provide instantly available power to “balance the grid” when the wind isn’t blowing. But so huge are the sums the grid is offering to make this power available that hundreds of canny investors have seen that this is one of the great money-making rackets of our time. In old industrial sites, quarries and supermarket premises all over the country they are piling in to install dedicated “generator parks”, capable of producing up to 100 megawatts (MW), in return for “availability payments” of up to £47,000 a year for each MW of their capacity. They then receive additional payment for the amount of electricity they actually feed to the grid, giving them an equivalent of £600 for each MW hour supplied – 12 times the going market rate. Before long STOR alone will be adding five per cent, or £1billion a year, to our electricity bills. Yet no one involved wants to talk about it. This is a scam so colossal that it makes the owners of those useless wind farms, who get subsidies of 100 or 150 per cent, seem miserably underpaid. By Christopher Booker 4:34PM BST 13 Jul 2013
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 22:53:45 +0000
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