Ed Miliband’s statement on Vestas blames NIMBYism for the failure of Vestas. The NIMBYs in question are no doubt well-off people who can afford expensive lawyers.
Certainly, there wasn’t this problem when the government evicted the East London working-class communities to make way for the deeply unpopular Olympics site. But fundamentally Miliband is saying that there is no market for onshore wind farms at the moment.
The supporting documents to the White Paper suggest that Miliband might be contradicting his own policy. The Renewable Energy Strategy document states:
“Our lead scenario suggests that by 2020 about 30% or more of all our electricity (about 117 TWh) — both centralised and small-scale generation — could come from renewable sources, compared to around 5.5% today. We expect the majority of this growth to come from wind power, through the deployment of more onshore and offshore wind turbines.”
A bar graph on renewable electricity technologies compares 2008 with projections to 2020. It shows that onshore wind accounted for about 3GW in 2008; it is expected to produce about 15GW by 2020, i.e. five-fold increase.
Other reports suggest a target of 4000 new onshore wind turbines by (12,00 blades) 2020. Vestas factory produces around 1,000 blades per year (enough for over 3000 new turbines). If the government refuses to nationalise at Vestas, it is setting up a much larger problem for reaching its targets in the future.
• Workers Climate Action replies to Ed Miliband. Debate from the Guardian: www.workersliberty.org/node/12789
