By Robert Mendick, and Edward Malnick in the Telegraph
A new analysis of government and industry figures shows that wind turbine owners received £1.2billion in the form of a consumer subsidy, paid by a supplement on electricity bills last year. They employed 12,000 people, to produce an effective £100,000 subsidy on each job.
The disclosure is potentially embarrassing for the wind industry, which claims it is an economically dynamic sector that creates jobs. It was described by critics as proof the sector was not economically viable, with one calling it evidence of “soft jobs” that depended on the taxpayer.
The subsidy was disclosed in a new analysis of official figures, which showed that:
• The level of support from subsidies in some cases is so high that jobs are effectively supported to the extent of £1.3million each;
• In Scotland, which has 203 onshore wind farms — more than anywhere else in the UK — just 2,235 people are directly employed to work on them despite an annual subsidy of £344million. That works out at £154,000 per job;
• Even if the maximum number of jobs that have been forecast are created, by 2020 the effective subsidy on them would be £80,000 a year.
One source, who owns several wind farms, and did not wish to be named, said: “Anybody trying to justify subsidies on the basis of jobs created is talking nonsense. Wind farms are not labour intensive.”
There has been mounting controversy about the value of both onshore and offshore wind farms, with discontent among back-bench Conservative MPs.
The industry’s trade body, Renewable UK, has campaigned to promote the method of electricity generation as a way to create jobs. It states on its website that: “We aim to create thousands of jobs across a wide range of business sectors.”
It says the industry currently employs 12,000 people and “is set to employ up to 90,000 people by 2020”.
The promise of future jobs is dependent on the building of large-scale wind farms at sea and the construction of factories in Britain to manufacture the turbines, which are currently almost all built abroad.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Proposal to use diesel generators to back up windfarms when it isn’t windy. (yes, really)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-22845487
@tallbloke
It makes perfect sense because most likely they will still receive the subsidized wind feed-in tariff per Mwatt/hour from the diesel generator ! The feed in tariff remains the same since the National Grid can’t tell whether this Mwatt/hour came from the wind turbine or from the diesel generator. A similar scam was uncovered in Spain a year or so back, when solar power plants were still generating power at night ! They fired up diesel generators when the sun went down !
Its likely going to be worse than that described here. It seems to me that disposal costs of the spent generators have not included? Recycling doesn’t come free, and is often ignored. However, if any industry should have got this factor right, I would have thought the renewable industry would have. The second point is the shortish life of these units which is proving to be around 20 years. Is every body aware that spending will start over, to renew with new machines to fill the gaps of the ones being disposed?
nzrobin says:
June 16, 2013 at 11:02 am “the shortish life of these units which is proving to be around 20 years”
The latest data suggests only 12 years and that is without the catastrophic failures we have been seeing lately.
So it is even worse than you think, plus they all still need backup.
Currently all renewables are producing a measly 0.56GW of energy, just over 1.5% of demand.
‘Proposal to use diesel generators to back up windfarms when it isn’t windy’
In other words at least 70% of the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_Kingdom
Wind turbines are a modernized version of a 19th century failed power source which fails to solve a miniscule problem at great expense.Wind power is unscalable, undependable and unprofitable. The only people making money from it are insiders receiving tax payer and or rate payer direct subsidies. Wind power can only operate if exempt from existing environmental regulations.
Green Energy = Regressive Taxation = Murdering the elderly.
When are the numbskulls in Westminister going to wake up to this “inconvenient truth”?
[…] Click here to read the full article _____________________________________________ […]
This what Vattenfall say about Thanet Wind Farm:
The total investment for completing the wind farm is in the order of around £780 million. A proportion of this was spent locally with benefits for local suppliers and services.
Local contractors and workers were used in support of the development.
A local maintenance facility has been built in the Port of Ramsgate, 21 people have been hired and 20 of these are from East Kent.
Tourism may be boosted. Many visitors have been attracted to both onshore and offshore wind farm developments in the past.
I live in Ramsgate – there has been no noticeable benefit from the farm. None.
So – 20 grunge jobs and a few managers for the thick end of a billion.
We travel to south Texas frequently, and have to drive by a large windmill farm on the way there and back.
I wonder if they count our driving by these huge, ugly towers as “windmill tourism”?
They are beautiful only in a science fiction-like sense of the term. Watching them from across Corpus Christi bay is a novel tech look. A warning of how extremists and profiteers will not stop at destroying formerly beautiful vistas in pursuit of their visions and loot.
The ratio of tourists attracted to tourists driven away is probably in triple digits.
Over at WUWT they have some really nice graphs by Neil Catto.
I thought that it was interesting that the average wind speed for the UK was about 7 MPH or so and the peaks were 0-25 MPH. Surely the low average would dictate that wind generation is never going to be a major player in the electricity field.