This could be way to blow away all those critics of wind power

Published on Thursday 25 June 2009 23:04

WITH much fanfare, the 140 turbines of the new Whitelee wind farm began to turn last month. Europe's largest onshore wind farm has taken ten years from inception to operation. Scotland now has more than 1,100 wind turbines in a bid to try to meet ambitious goals of 50 per cent of electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

It is estimated Scotland will need a further 2,000 turbines to get even close the hitting this target, alongside developing more reliable tidal stream fields.

Wind's critics are numerous and claim such turbines are unreliable, unsightly and uneconomic. They certainly depend on the weather, they can incur the wrath of locals on grounds of environmental blight, and they are controversially funded by public subsidy through a tax on electricity bills.

No matter how it is dressed up by wind's supporters, this form of energy has performed miserably when we have endured energy-intensive periods such as the cold snap in February and the recent warm spell. Both were high pressure periods.

While Britain shivered in the heaviest snowfall for 20 years, the country's wind farms supplied a risible 0.3 per cent of electricity demand. During the warm spell in early June when people reached for air conditioners and other air cooling aides, wind averaged 0.1 per cent of British electricity supply. We relied heavily on nuclear and gas power. When we needed wind power, there was no wind.

So long as wind is regarded and used as a primary source of energy, it will incur the wrath of its numerous opponents familiar with its failings. Instead, we should be supporting wind as a secondary energy source, as a kind of back-up which can generate energy to be stored and used later when needed. Only then can wind become regarded as a vital and indispensable renewable.

Today's ideal energy policy needs to identify a solution that provides a clean, environmentally neutral fuel that is not geographically constrained, so can be generated anywhere. We must also recoup our vast investment in wind energy.

The answer could lie with British companies such as ITM Power, which has developed specialist electrolysers which go a long way to validating and answering wind's critics. These are devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis.

Using electrolysers, electricity generated from wind energy can produce an alternative, environmentally neutral clean fuel, namely hydrogen. This can then be stored in large quantities and used later in hydrogen cars, power plants and to power the zero carbon home.

Importantly, when the wind blows at 3am, we waste the electricity generated because it isn't used or stored. If electrolysers were deployed, we could store the energy as a clean fuel to be used whenever we need it.

Hydrogen is compatible with today's car engines and can, in principle, be used in our growing number of gas-fired power stations, so as to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and gas, as the North Sea runs down.

ITM has gone further, applying hydrogen to fuel today's vehicle engines. A modified Ford Focus took part in this month's London to Brighton Eco rally. The government was wrong to support only electric cars in the Budget. Modified engines can run on hydrogen, and their only emissions are water vapour.

World oil and gas reserves are rapidly depleting. Policymakers should now move to support the hydrogen economy and consequently resolve the renewables dilemma.

&#149 Tony Lodge is a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies