By Ann McElhinney & Phelim McAleer

In the UK the media are getting very excited about wind power.

But as we discussed before environmental journalists seem to be little more than nodding dogs who endlessly believe and cheerlead everything they are told by activist groups.

Bringing truth to power seems to disappear when the power is a well funded environmental group. And so it is with wind power. Recently the BBC and Channel 4 have carried big excited stories about a planned new wind farm in UK. However neither felt it important to EVEN mention the little issue of “back up”. Both reports made much of the wind farm being able to power 180,000 homes which they stated could produce enough energy to power Glasgow.

But the nodding dogs are being dishonest and disingenuous. Wind will never power towns or cities on their own and giving that impression is both dangerous and misleading. We still need fossil fuels to keep us safe and the lights on as reported in this Reuters story.  “Britain, which aims to install about 30 gigawatts (GW) of wind turbines by 2020, will need to build almost as much backup power generation for calm weather periods, an executive from Scottish Power said on Wednesday,” Reuters reported.

“Thirty gigawatts of wind maybe requires 25 GW of backup,” said Rupert Steele, regulation director at the Scottish arm of Spain’s Iberdrola, one of the world’s largest wind farm operators. “The problem is that if you’ve got a high-pressured area, you may have quite a large area where there’s no wind at all ... That happens also offshore,” he told Reuters.”

Environmentalists know this. Just ask them to send their child to a hospital whose system is fully dependent on wind power and watch them run in the other direction. They know that wind is erratic and will never supply the electricity that keeps our towns, cities factories, schools and hospitals running and all of us safe and healthy. But they don’t tell us this when they triumphantly pronounce that we can power the world with solar and wind. What is so much more disappointing is that so called ‘impartial’ reporters don’t tell us either.

Shame on you Channel 4 and BBC for not reporting this truth to your viewers.

See earlier story “The Answer My Friend is NOT Blowing in the Wind” here.

See Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) in this Washington Observer Interview says its so well here.

See more about Ann and Phelim’s important Not Evil, Just Wrong project.

See in this UK register story, about another green favorite boondoggle, the electric car. The Politicians’ obsession with electric cars is a waste of time - and costing British science and research dearly. So says Richard Pike, head of the Royal Chemistry Society, in a hard-hitting contribution to Research Fortnight (pdf).