No
There's a myth that needs to be exploded. It centres around a word, a word packed with meaning but in itself meaningless. It's a big word in Europe, and it will become a big part of Irish vocabulary. It will justify a lot of things, but those things in themselves will be unjustifiable.
The word is "sustainable". It's a word that works best when combined with another, equally meaningless word: "renewable". You'll hear these words a lot in the next few years, but after a while you'll wish you had never heard them at all.
There will soon be a demonstration of what "sustainable" and "renewable" mean for Ireland. The Arklow Bank, off the coast of Co Wicklow may be the first part of the Irish coastline to be destroyed, at the expense of the taxpayer, to provide the country with something it cannot use and will not need.
Advocates of wind energy are in love with the word "renewable" and are convinced that the Republic's greatest unharnessed resource is the wind. "We think wind will provide the cheapest electricity for Ireland," says Declan Flannagan, manager of regulatory affairs at Eirtricity, the developer of the Arklow Bank project. The project is not the first of its kind in Ireland, and will certainly not be the last. By the time it is all finished, it will be evident that the introduction of one new word in the vocabulary invariably leads to the elimination of another: serenity. Eirtricity says the 500-megawatt project will cost £450 million, to be spent on 200 wind turbines standing 300 feet above the sea within sight of the coast. According to the company, the turbines will provide 500,000 homes with power and eliminate one million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
Some disagree with its claims. "Wind energy is the least reliable energy source. Windfarms typically work only about 27 per cent of the time, and at peak times and optimal efficiency, this project would only be able to provide about 100,000 homes with power. A similar investment in a modern gas-powered plant would save more carbon dioxide, provide more reliable power and not be a blight on the landscape," says Ian Fells, professor of energy conversion at Newcastle University and a promoter of renewable-energy projects.
Renewable energy is, unfortunately, anything but renewable. It's just another environmental trade-off - but in this case the stakes are much higher and the returns very low.
We trade in the quality of our lives all the time. We enjoy the benefits of electrical power by trading in a certain amount of money and by ignoring the small amount of pollution that power plants produce. Renewable energy requires a much bigger trade-off, because it involves cashing in the serenity and beauty of the countryside for energy that does not pollute the air and is supposedly free once the initial investment is made.
Hydroelectric power, the first form of renewable energy exploited on a wide scale, is often seen as benign. But building a dam on the scale needed to provide power for a national grid alters the landscape of an area, albeit sometimes for the better. But in a deregulated electricity market, power providers can no longer afford the massive long-term investment required for hydroelectric projects. Windmills are a cheap alternative.
This trade-off would almost be acceptable, if it worked. But it doesn't, as most people in the home of renewable energy are about to tell the world. Nirvana for wind-energy enthusiasts is Denmark, a country with the most windmills per capita, the highest electricity costs in the world and the least popular government in western Europe. The patron saint of the windmill is Svend Auken, the unpopular, autocratic environment minister whom many Danes hold responsible for destroying their landscape.
But the Department of Public Enterprise thinks it has a lot to learn from Auken and the Danish experience, and has analysed their plans to generate up to 50 per cent of their energy from wind by 2030. They had better study fast, because the Danish elections have to be held before March of next year, and the ruling Social Democrats enjoy support from just 22 per cent of the country. The next election is expected to be a landslide for the Conservatives and Liberals, and high on the list of reforms is the abolition of subsidies for wind generators.
The Danes, who have more experience than anyone of wind energy, are going to eliminate the very programme the Republic is trying to emulate.
For the people of Denmark, the only country in the world where more is spent on the environment than on healthcare, the windmill is a symbol of government arrogance and a blight on the countryside. In the areas of Denmark that have seen a lot of windmill development, tourism has fallen off by 40 per cent.
"It would be a terrible shame if the Irish allowed their government to destroy every vestige of natural beauty, as has happened in Denmark," says Mikael Jakobsen, the head of the Danish group, Neighbours to Windmills.
For the engineers who run the national grid in Denmark, the introduction of wind power is a nightmare come true. The problem with wind power is that, although it provides a certain amount of electricity, it is so unreliable that conventional generating plants have to provide "shadow power" to supply the grid. According to Hugh Sharman, head of Incoteco, a Danish energy and power consultancy: "The suppliers of electric power must always balance, from second to second, demand. In a small electric system like Denmark's, it is compounded when wind is accepted into the grid, almost completely uncontrolled and in unpredictable amounts. This results in thermal power stations running at less than optimal efficiency and requiring thermal capacity to be kept in spinning reserve when they consume energy but deliver no useful power." What this means is that, even in Denmark, carbon dioxide is still being produced in significant quantities just to support the illusion of renewable energy.
The biggest objections to wind energy come from those who have to live closest to the 300-foot turbines and listen to the blades, which are larger than the wings of a Boeing 747, spinning day and night. The Irish Government, once again picking up some wisdom from the Danes, has a policy to deal with this problem. Not surprisingly, it involves cutting a few lucky people into the deal. The Government outlined strategies to eliminate local resistance to wind farms in a report, Strategy for Intensifying Wind Energy Deployment. Among the options being considered for buying off the locals is equity participation in projects, reduced pricing for electricity and tax exemptions.
The big driver for renewable energy is the threat of global warming, which is theoretically caused by the greenhouse gases - the most common of which is carbon dioxide - created when fossil fuels are burned. To provide a perspective on Ireland's input to the problem of global warming, the energy research firm, Wood Mackenzie, says Ireland annually emits about 38.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. This may seem a substantial amount, but it is a fraction of the 3.1 billion tonnes the EU produces each year, and the 23 billion tonnes the world emits.
Although there is a general consensus that man-made greenhouse gases may be responsible for a gradual warming of the atmosphere, the theory of global warming remains at best a respectable hypothesis.
The Republic could immediately reduce its emission of greenhouse gases by completing the process of converting from coal to natural gas, and by investing a modest amount to improve public transport in Dublin. But making concrete changes in the infrastructure of the Republic no longer interests the Government. There is more political capital in sacrificing common-sense and pandering to the environmental lobby, because that's where the votes are.
The elderly couple from, say, Arizona, who save for years to make the trip of a lifetime to the Irish countryside, will not be impressed by the sight of towering wind turbines on top of every rolling hill.
Tourism is not a renewable industry, but it still provides 135,000 jobs throughout the countryside and generates more than £2.5 billion in foreign-exchange earnings. People don't pay good money to see the countryside turned into an industrial power-generating sight, or to look out at the ocean and see hundreds of spinning windmills on the horizon. As the Danes have learned, beauty and serenity cannot be renewed once they are lost. The Irish should listen to the people of Denmark, and wait until they have spoken at the polls, before emulating their experience.
Brian O'Connell is author of The Whole World's Watching: Decarbonizing The Economy And Saving The World (Wiley, 2000).