Revealed: Wind farm power twice as costly as gas or coal

The true cost of Britain’s massive expansion of wind farms has been revealed.

It costs nearly twice as much to generate electricity from an offshore wind farm as it does from a conventional power station, a scientific report has concluded.

And while the price of wind power is expected to fall in the coming decade, the researchers admit there is a slight chance it could rise even further.

Full of hot air: The EU has targeted 10,000 new wind farms, but a study has revealed that it costs nearly twice as much to produce wind power as it does from traditional gas or coal power stations

The study comes amid Britain’s ‘dash for wind’ – one of the biggest engineering projects of the last few decades.

Over the next ten years, the Government wants up to 10,000 new wind turbines to be built at sea and on land to meet tough climate change targets.

The report, from the UK Energy Research Centre – a Government funded academic think tank – said the costs of offshore wind power were underestimated in the mid-2000s.

Instead of costs falling as predicted, in the last five years the cost of buying and installing turbines and towers at sea has gone up by 51 per cent.

Once the bill for building and maintaining an offshore wind farm is spread over the 25-year lifespan of a typical farm, each kilowatt hour of electricity now costs 15p.

That’s nearly twice as expensive as electricity from conventional coal and gas power stations, which costs 8p a unit, and more than nuclear, which costs 10p a unit.

A unit of electricity from an onshore wind turbine costs 9p, the report says. The author of the study, Dr Robert Gross, predicts that the costs are likely to fall over the next decade to around 11p.

However there is a ‘very small chance’ that it could soar to nearly 19p.

The true cost of wind is likely to be much higher than the 15p a unit outlined in the report.

Because wind is intermittent, the National Grid is forced to rely on a fleet of gas and coal power stations to back up the supply when the wind fails.

The switch to wind is an attempt to meet Europe’s climate change targets which state Britain must generate 15 per cent of its energy from renewable sources – such as wind, tides or solar – by 2020.

Energy experts say up to 40 per cent of all the UK’s electricity will have to be generated by renewable sources within ten years – and that wind will take the lion’s share.

And by law, a tenth of the electricity sold by energy companies must come from green sources this year. The figure rises to 15 per cent by 2015.

At present about 20 per cent of a typical fuel bill – or £200 – is used to subsidise green energy.

Dr Gross predicted that fuel bill payers would continue to subsidise offshore wind until ‘at least the mid 2020s’.