the wind farm that goes ping

Fri, Apr 15, 2011

Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) have sold off three of their wind farms. However, in the best Monty Python tradition, they’re buying the electricity back from the company they sold one of the wind farms to. Presumably as that means it “comes out of the monthly current budget and not the capital account” (cue rapturous applause)

More worrying, it would seem to be cheaper to buy electricity from a wind farm than to actually produce it. That smacks of public subsidies at work somewhere. I was under the impression that a company had an obligation to clean up after 25 years of operating a wind farm but here is proof that is perhaps not true. Presumably the buyers have also bought the clean up obligations but it’s not clear if that’s the case.

Even more worrying, are we going to see a new market opening up in wind farm trading. Big companies who can absorb the initial cost, offset with public money, create the farms and then sell them on to smaller firms who otherwise can’t afford to break into the industry.

SSE have said , “… the move would optimise its wind farm portfolio”. You can understand a company optimising its share portfolio for instance, on the grounds that a market or two are imploding and considered unsafe environments for investors’ cash. But wind is everywhere. And wind farms are sited to maximise use of the wind. Surely?

There are two conclusions one could draw from SSE’s statement. Either the farms in question are not making enough money to get their initial investment back, or the modest sums they’re creaming from the environment aren’t enough for their profits. So they sell off less profitable ones and go on the hunt for locations for more profitable ones. In the meantime, the modest returns on these farms are sufficient to sustain smaller companies.

The really worrying aspect of this is the possible trend of huge power companies swallowing vast tracts of land down their industrial gullets and crapping out turbine spoor, on which hordes of lesser species thrive as the behemoth moves on to the next pristine location.