One of Spain's last untouched landscapes, the Sierra de Gata in north-western Extremadura, may shortly be inundated with up to 91 wind farms. Ecologists are increasingly concerned about the impact these "parques eólicos" may have on the varied wildlife of the region - and, not least, on its pristine landscapes. Currently, Extremadura is popular with nature tourists, particularly walkers and birdwatchers from all over Europe. For centuries this region was so off the beaten track that many people in the Spanish cities had never heard of it. Now the Sierra is waking up to the 21st century, and it threatens to be a rude awakening.

Only George Orwell could have invented - and named - the British Government's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) that came into operation yesterday. It is the latest in a long line of measures intended to ease the conscience of the rich while keeping the poor miserable, in this case spectacularly so. ...The British Government has been persuaded by the wind turbine manufacturers to commit a third of its annual renewables subsidy to this uniquely inefficient energy source, advertising over hill and dale the cabinet's horror of making a decision on nuclear power. ...If all these fancy subsidies and market manipulations were withdrawn tomorrow and government action confined to energy-saving regulation, I am convinced the world would be a cheaper and a safer place, and the poor would not be threatened with starvation. Just now, for reasons not all of which are "green", commodity prices are soaring. Leave them. Send food parcels to the starving, but let demand evoke supply and stop curbing trade. The marketplace is never perfect, but in this matter it could not be worse than government action. Playing these games has so far made a few people very rich at the cost of the taxpayer. Now the cost is in famine and starvation. This is no longer a game.

What's telling is that the European interest hasn't wavered even though U.S. federal subsidies for clean energy are slated to expire this year and have yet to be extended. Historically, the federal tax-credits have been make-or-break for the industry. Now, though, it appears other factors weigh more heavily. EDP is so anxious to expand in the U.S. that it ordered more wind turbines from India's Suzlon this week, even though those Suzlon machines have had technical glitches. The big drivers? State incentives for renewable energy, like those in Texas; a slow but inexorable shift in the U.S. toward cleaner energy; and the high-quality wind resources in the U.S., which dwarf those of Europe (and other parts of the world.)

While wind energy is being wildly supported by many in the U.S., there have always been drawbacks to the performance and costs of these machines. The U.S. has had a heavily subsidized romance with them for nearly 40 years and too few of the state and federal policy makers have taken a close look at what the tens of billions in subsidies have actually done for the taxpayers. These wind energy programs have made many companies such as Florida Power and Light very wealthy because of the heavy subsidies, tax credits, and accelerated depreciation allowance. Additional benefits come from local taxing authorities. This source of energy remains very unreliable and limited, having produced only about 1% of the nation's energy for decades.

Here's the $36 billion question: Is wind power an expensive distraction or a key ingredient in the global energy cocktail? It all depends how you move the juice. ...Doubts over the real contribution of wind power aren't just an American thing. Energy Tribune recites the entire litany of arguments against wind power, one of Britain's hopes for curbing emissions of greenhouse-gases and meeting ambitious European targets for clean energy. ET's verdict? Wind power is "overblown": Too dependent on subsidies, plagued by technical problems, intermittent, and ugly to boot, threatening to tarnish forever British hills and beaches. (Ask vacationers in Brighton what ugly really is.) It's true that wind power's development-in the U.S. and elsewhere-relies almost entirely on subsidies. ...And there's little chance wind farms will ever come close to producing 90% of their headline generation capacity, as nuclear does; the best machines in the best spots now offer about a 35% "load factor". But the real question when computing cost doesn't lie just with the turbines themselves, but rather how to get that electricity onto the grid.

Worldwide opposition to wind power has now reached a crescendo and governments have been forced to respond with new planning regulations which impose the technology, often against huge objection. Public distaste for wind turbines revolves around landscape impact and concerns about noise and loss of tranquillity, but technical objections are of greater concern. ...The power industry concedes that wind turbines would not be built without unprecedented consumer-sourced subsidy or massive tax breaks. It is time for the threat posed by intermittent renewables, not least in requiring CO2-emitting coal-fired spinning reserve, to be investigated independently, without political interference.

Another area where the French have emphatically got it right is in power generation. After the oil shocks of 1973, France, with no significant oil or gas reserves of its own, embarked on a massive expansion of nuclear power, completely ignoring the doom-mongerers such as Greenpeace. The result has been an unqualified success story. Today, France has 59 nuclear power plants producing 78 per cent of its electricity needs. Electricity is so cheap and abundant that much of it is exported to the UK and Germany, earning the French economy about three billion euros a year. ...And because nuclear emits no carbon or pollutants, France is also one of the "greenest" countries in the industrialised world.

In 1996, Denmark went on to hit industrial producers with a $15 per tonne carbon tax, initially neutralized by cuts in payroll taxes. What happened? By 1998, manufacturers started shutting their doors due to high energy prices, and overall Danish carbon tax revenues started to fall along with manufacturing jobs. At the same time, the cost of government programs rose significantly. The government's solution incredibly was to - wait for it - subsidize electricity to select manufacturers and raise income taxes by lowering the income threshold on the country's top marginal rate. By 2001, with economic growth hovering at one- seventh-of-one-percent, Danes making over CAD$50,000 paid 59 per cent of their income in taxes and had to cope with record electricity prices. The entire debacle led to a change of government that year, with the incoming government promising a tax freeze, followed by a tax reduction - including those taxes on energy.

Any approach to determining economic policy for climate change should take into account the possibility that the current understanding of the atmosphere may not be translatable into reliable forecasts with a precision that allows the design of an economic response. Further, any economic forecasts that are used to construct models of future carbon use and carbon dioxide emissions will be unable to deal with technical innovations. Their success cannot be predicted. This impacts on policy in two ways, first the obvious uncertainty in estimating economic development but more immediately the desire of governments to stimulate technical solutions. The need to be seen to be taking action frequently descends to picking winners and creating classes of rent seekers. ...As an example the present subsidies for wind farms are a response to demands for action from Green groups and green politicians. The result is a new rent seeking group. There is little cost benefit analysis to guide policy development. Rather policy is set to subsidise non-competitive technologies that may produce unquantified benefits. A simple comparison with the more conventional alternative of natural gas shows the use of gas to be more cost effective and useful as gas turbine generators produce electricity on demand. General encouragement of innovation should be the limit of government policy. It is hard enough in business to develop innovations and well beyond the reach of general government.

If you thought the 2008 presidential race was shattering all records for windy rhetoric, it's nothing compared to the political eco-rhetoric being spun to US taxpayers -- to get them to cough up billions of dollars to fuel a renewable wind power industry boom sensible investors won't touch with a turbine's rotor blade. ...Wind power sounds a great European success story -- one to be echoed in the US, it seems, as 2008 is set to see wind power developments shatter records for the fourth consecutive year. However, a closer look at the European "success" story reveals that all is not quite as it seems. Wind seems to be blowing in the mind of the politically correct and those on the recent environmentalist bandwagon but the cost is going to be huge, no companies will plunge into it without massive government subsidies and, if actually built, power reliability will take a nosedive. ...The bottom line is that the renewables debate, and investment in it, is as much about ideology and political belief as it is about economics and environmental issues. When the real cost of turbine power as a major player toward our future power needs is assessed, the answer just ain't "blowing in the wind".

The greens favour high oil prices because consumers use less of the stuff when it costs more, and because high prices for oil make other forms of energy more competitive. Nuclear power, solar energy, wind power or any of the other substitutes for fossil fuels can become more economically viable only if oil prices stay about where they are - and politicians stump up some generous subsidies, sceptics would add. Meanwhile, the hunt for the proverbial free lunch is on. The most efficient way to cut the use of fossil fuels is to make them more expensive by taxing them, or the emissions they create. But politicians are as unenthusiastic about transparency in the cost of cleaning up the environment as they are about increasing the transparency of the funding of political parties. So most proposals to cut carbon emissions are built around a single proposition: hide their cost from voters. ...Even the emerging favourite in the United States and Europe, a cap on emissions followed by a trading of permits, is a hide-the-cost device: costs of compliance will be passed on as higher prices. So the blame will go to car makers, supermarkets, electricity utilities, and oil companies, the applause to politicians. All so politicians can avoid the transparent device of a tax on carbon or carbon emissions.

In recent times investor capital has been squandered by poor site selection, by turbine design compromises and by careless operations leading to premature catastrophic equipment failures. These are the symptoms of a juvenile industry that unless modified will serve to marginalize it indefinitely. Site selection presently is done with two factors in mind; the presence of wind (almost anecdotally) and the proximity of transmission lines. All aero dynamists understand the degree of productive difference between "dirty" and "clean" air. Wind turbine parks in or near mountains have to be in some of the "dirtiest" air possible. It is no mystery why there is a special checkout for all pilots wanting to operate aircraft in mountainous terrain; it is just plain rough and more dangerous. "Dirty" air is also very hard on transmissions/gear boxes and blade feathering mechanisms. Turbines operating in "dirty" air suffer an inordinate amount of breakdowns twisting the expected financial results out of all recognition. In the absence of specific "dirty" air turbine designs, investment success will elude the unwary.

There are two main issues with wind turbines: they have to be connected to the power grid, which involves some tricky technical problems, and wind doesn't blow all the time. ..."The total cost of wind should take account of that backup requirement, and the total costs of wind on the system is not computed today. In a market such as the US, where you don't have the same driver of carbon credits, wind doesn't have that benefit going for it. In Ireland, we need to have a market structure that will incentivise developers to build the (backup) plant. We need to pay for available capacity, not just energy." That hasn't been set up yet, as it would need legislative action, not just planning, and when fully costed, such a capacity market would be controversial. The consumer would be paying for a lot of plant sitting idle over two thirds of the time.

A meagre 6% of Europe's energy is currently derived from renewable sources (primarily from hydro-electricity). By 2020, the European commission wants to increase that proportion to 20% ...While Gordon Brown stated earlier this month that virtually all of Britain's electricity will have to come from low-carbon sources by 2020, his government is resisting the steps that have to be taken for that vision to become reality. The UK has reportedly told Brussels officials that anything above a 9% target for renewables would be too costly. ...a sizeable chunk of the emission cuts the EU expects to see in the next few years depend on its member states buying carbon credits from foreign countries.

The IPCC has depended on computer climate models for its claims and there is now a volume of papers demonstrating how they have repeatedly been proven to be inaccurate. ..."The most elaborate of all their ‘evaluation' techniques is far more dubious," said Dr. Gray. "Since they have failed to show that any models are actually capable of prediction, they have decided to ‘evaluate' them by asking the opinions of those who originate them, people with a financial interest in their success." "Sooner or later all of us will come to realize," Dr. Gray concluded, "that this organization, and the thinking behind it, is phony. Unfortunately severe economic damage is likely to be done by its influence before that happens."

The passionate advocacy of wind and solar power cannot change the fact that they are in their infancy and incapable of providing most of our power needs. Neither can the environmental activist's vision of a world in which all live simpler lives without the need for so much power be anything but a fantasy which no developing nation would ever take seriously. The reality is that without our being allowed to discuss all power generation options, the eco-activist's dystopian vision of New Zealand risks coming true.

The wind energy industry has been growing at nearly 30 percent per year for the last decade. The heavy push for more green energy has created a gold rush of sorts...which means buyer beware ...

With all the supposed truths out there about global warming, here's one that doesn't get reported very often. Europe isn't the climate-change champion that its leaders, and their American apologists, would have you believe.........European policy makers have plenty of motivation to goad Washington into going along with their approach before too many people realize it isn't working. At a summit in March, EU national leaders dramatically raised the stakes by pledging a 20% cut in CO2 emissions by 2020. That's a real laugher considering their scant chances of meeting their Kyoto commitment of 8% by 2012. Their move is best seen as a bluff intended to pressure the U.S. into the game. Here in Europe, the grand gesture is always the most appealing play.

Dick Keane recently raised the very important question as to what happens when the wind drops and wind turbines are no longer able to make a contribution to the national grid (Letters, August 6). He suggested other, more suitable, ways to use wind power, which do not require a constant output of electricity. It was disappointing, therefore, to read in Emmet Egan's letter, on behalf of the Irish Wind Energy Association, that the Irish solution to the problem is to pass the buck to Eirgrid, because it has the spare capacity to cope when the wind drops. Is the Irish wind industry not making any attempt at all to look at other alternatives for using the output from their wind farms? It was consoling to read in your business pages that Eirgrid has the power to meet winter peak demand, even if the wind drops as we are in the middle of cooking the Christmas dinner.

But gradually the realization dawned that wind power is not all it had been cracked up to be by Al Gore-style environmentalists, its most obvious drawback of course being that wind is so unreliable. This creates three separate but related problems. First, turbines produce only a fraction of their "installed capacity", so the amount of power they actually provide is derisory. ...Second, so unpredictable are the instances when the wind blows at sufficient strength that conventional power stations must be kept permanently running, ...The third problem, thanks to this unpredictability, is that the more a country comes to rely on wind energy, the more it risks destabilizing its grid through sudden surges or drops in the energy from its turbines.