EDF Boss Urges Miliband To Stop Building Wind Farms
On June 11th, the boss of energy firm EDF Simone Rossi urged Ed Miliband to stop building wind farms around the UK
The Telegraph ran this story:
Britain should stop building wind farms because the country has too much electricity, the UK boss of EDF Energy has said.
Simone Rossi, the energy giant’s chief executive, said Ed Miliband’s expansion of wind and solar power was creating far more electricity generation capacity than needed.
Mr Rossi told The Telegraph: “We should stop building wind farms and focus instead on raising demand for electricity … As a country we don’t need more electricity generation capacity. We need to use the generation capacity we have already got.
“As a country, we’ve always got it wrong. We’ve always thought electricity demand was going to increase, but it decreased … So now we have this large [generating] infrastructure, twice as much as we need, which means we also need to build twice the [transmission] grid.”
He added: “These are all fixed costs – so the key question is how are we going to absorb those fixed costs? My conclusion is that the time has come to shift the debate from building more [infrastructure] and just stop it for the foreseeable future. That’s enough. The issue now is how we use it.”
Mr Rossi’s call for a pause on wind farms comes as Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, drives a substantial expansion of renewable energy. Earlier this year, he signed off on plans to build the biggest onshore wind farm in the UK in a decade.
Many turbines are built in remote locations that require new cabling to be installed to carry their power. The build out of the grid has failed to keep pace, meaning electricity generation at times threatens to overwhelm it.
As a result, taxpayers are increasingly having to pay to switch off turbines at times when the grid cannot handle their power.
See the Telegraph article here.
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Header image: Renewables News