You can peruse the policy here (pdf).

That’s what one Reg reader discovered, after enquiring about the Trust’s calculations on the effectiveness of new low-energy bulbs.

“A reduction in electricity consumption will be essential over the coming decade as a large number of power stations are being withdrawn from service, and as a result there is a gap looming between supply and demand,” Graham Crocker was told. “More efficient lighting (which accounts for nearly 20 per cent of domestic electricity consumption) will go some way to alleviating these demand pressures.” The answer came from Alex Stuart, assistant manager of services of development at the quango.

“This is the first time anybody has acknowledged that new power capacity will not be delivered on time to replace existing capacity,” Peter Lilley MP told us.

There’s no doubt that Britain faces a looming energy crisis. CapGemini estimates that a quarter of the UK’s energy plant capacity will close by 2015. The nation will also see declining oil and gas output from the North Sea. But new, replacement power generation will not arrive in time.

The capacity crisis is largely a consequence of EU environmental directives. The Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD), which affects coal and oil power stations generating 50MW or more, obliges plant operators to adapt their stations by the end of 2015, or close them down. E.ON has decided that three of its four stations which fall under the directive will shut.

But the directive was introduced in 2001, leaving the state plenty of time to plan ahead.

“There is a gap looming because of New Labour’s incompetence,” James Woudhuysen, Professor of Forecasting at De Montfort University, and co-author of Energise! told us.

In 2003, then PM Tony Blair had blocked plans for new nuclear power stations, he pointed out. “Today’s government is now planning nuclear operations to resume in 2018, but more likely 2025,” says Woudhuysen.

But should the public turn out the lights because of years because of the failure of political leadership?

“If people are being asked to use electricity as efficiently as possible, they should do that because it’s a cost-efficient thing to do, rather than because the government created a crisis through bad planning,” says Lilley.

Complicating things is an additional dilemma, of the government’s own making.

The Whitehall department responsible for keeping Britain’s lights on now has additional duties of “tackling climate change” and “moving towards a low-carbon economy” – it’s the new “Department of Energy and Climate Change” (DECC). This means it is obliged to oppose exactly the kind of fossil-fuel power generation capacity that will save Britain from blackouts. So which will it choose?

On the department’s own website, under the heading “What We Do” – Climate Change is a higher priority than maintaining the UK energy supply.

The Energy Savings Trust has a budget of £43m a year. Around 150 staff are on secondment from BERR, the former Department of Trade and Industry. Much of its work is duplicated by two other quangos – the £250m a year Carbon Trust, and Envirowise.

The remit is explicitly to change people’s consumption patterns. The umbrella project “Act on CO2″, intended to co-ordinate the output of different government departments, was described as “the premier government-backed behaviour change brand” according to tender documents seen by The Register.

“The Energy Saving Trust is about making you feel guilty about ‘your impact on climate change’. It is about how you can generate your own energy – no doubt as efficiently as a normal power station,” says Woudhuysen.

“With rights, Tony Blair enlightened us, come responsibilities. This clearly means that New Labour has the right to screw up on energy supply – while hectoring us about how we should take responsibility for its failures.”

The Trust was named as the 9th most useless quango in 2005 – along with the Potato Council.

Footnote

For a quango that puts communications as priority, the Trust doesn’t half drag its feet on responding to enquiries – reader Graham Crocker spent a fruitless three months trying to get answers. Eventually, the Trust admitted, the low energy bulbs make little difference to the householder because the lower heat output in cool climates – like ours – means people spend more on heating. “The Trust do not seem to have fully formed policies or a coherent strategy to deliver them,” Graham concludes.

“It is indisputable that polar ice caps are melting – we can see that with our own eyes,” Lord Hunt, Minister of State of the Department of Energy, told the house. Hunt described himself as a climate “agnostic” – but he was swiftly corrected by Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former Chancellor.

“My Lords, that is not true of the past year; The noble Lord’s predecessors were seriously misinformed by his officials, and I suspect that he will be too,” Lawson replied. Twisting the knife he continued: “That is a real problem for him, and I feel for him.

“The fact is that in the Antarctic, where most of the ice is, the ice is thickening and has been for some time. In the Arctic this year there has been a greater extension of ice than ever before.”

The Lords were debating the Climate Change Bill once again – which the Commons voted through on an unusually snowy October evening recently. That Bill was passed by our elected representatives by 463 votes to 3. Would the unelected upper chamber – which has a reputation for rejecting and amendment hasty legislation – be show greater scrutiny?

You can guess the answer to that one. The Amendments were passed by around 190 to 10. But the Lordships’ debate was at least broader and deeper than the six hours of greener-than-thou pledges relayed in the Commons last month. A significant speech by Nigel Lawson, now Lord Lawson, made the difference. Lawson described it as the first and last speech he would make on the Bill – but more of that in a moment.

The debate gave the Government and its supporters the chance to say something they hadn’t in the Commons. That hand on heart, that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Quite literally. Take this exchange between The Earl of Onslow and Lord Hunt. Onslow asked:

“The world’s climate has got colder over the past 10 years, just, while world emissions have risen by quite a lot. Can the Minister explain that?”

“My Lords, I am not a scientist,” the Minister replied, “and it is not my role to debate the intricacies of scientific arguments”.

“The committees and the expert groups that have looked into these matters and which have informed the government’s decision: it is on their conclusions that the 80 per cent target is now based.”

That’s a very odd reply, since Hunt didn’t need to offer a scientific argument, he’d been confronted with two assertions of fact. Either they were true or they were false. Hunt’s answer avoiding expressing his own judgement either way. Instead, the Minister of State preferred to pass – indicating that a) facts are irrelevant and b) saying he had total confidence in someone else’s judgement. In fact Hunt deferred several times in answers to the “committees and expert groups” to make his political judgements on his behalf.

When politicians defer to the “science” – that means that judgements are being made by their appointed committees and quangos. And the committees, it turns out, are highly political – they’ve got an axe to grind. They’re doing politics on our behalf. This is a kind of evisceration of democratic politics: if these quangos are so wise that we aren’t permitted to question the political judgements they produce – we may as well appoint wise quangos to do all of our politics for us.

And Guy Fawkes really could have saved himself the trouble of buying all that gunpowder: we’ve arrived at No Parliament by other means.

So to Lawson.

After Mrs Thatcher’s former Chancellor had written a book on policy responses to climate change, he discovered that no British publisher would take it. A US publisher brought it to market, and it’s since become a hit, translated into two languages.

Lawson’s main point was that this was a futile gesture. It didn’t require the UK to cut its own emissions by one gram. But the consequences of this gesture were costly. He began by explaining why he hadn’t spoken before in the House:

“I felt that it was unbecoming for an unbeliever to take part in a religious service, which is what all this is really about.

“The Bill will go down in history, and future generations will see it as the most absurd Bill that this House and Parliament as a whole as ever had to examine, and it has now become more absurd with the increase from 60 per cent to 80 per cent.”

A futile unilateral gesture?

Lawson invited the Lordships to “pretend the planet is warming” – and ignore the figures from the Met Office and Hadley Centre. (Lawson said he didn’t see the evidence supported the claim that the planet was cooling, but it certainly hadn’t done a lot of warming since the 1998 El Nino). “The majority of climate scientists do not think that if there were a warming, it would be a disaster.” So what then?

The point of the bill was symbolic – and only “makes sense” if other countries were to follow suit and make similarly symbolic gestures, he argued.

(The UK only contributes 2 per cent of man-made CO2 emissions worldwide, while worldwide human emissions are only 2 per cent of the planet’s CO2 output. And the planet’s CO2 is about one tenth of greenhouse gas. So the rhetoric is about “setting an example”.)

The problem, said Lawson, was that Europe had planned to isolate the US, a plan that had “backfired horribly”. This left the EU making symbolic pledges of its own – no one expects China, the world’s biggest CO2 emitter, or India to follow. Except that the Europeans are now backing off. The catchy 20 per cent by 2020 reduction has been abandoned. Germans need their coal, the new members like Poland need theirs – and are playing industrialisation catch-up – and the whole thing is falling apart.

“Nothing will happen. It can only be agreed unanimously and will be looked at again in December this year, after the Poznan meeting, which I hope the Minister will grace with his presence. It will be an educational event for him.”

Lawson highlighted a recent conference called “Cashing in on Carbon” in which an investment group featuring Lord Stern was prominently featured.

“So the people who gave you the glories and the joys of mortgage-backed securities are now offering the great business opportunity of carbon-backed securities.”

Meanwhile the emissions trading system was a “scam”: China made a lot of money selling these worthless indulgences. So much money, it had to tax them. Climate change had also proved to be a vote-loser for the Canadian Liberal opposition – its “green shift” cost it the election – and in New Zealand, said Lawson. He also warned the Tory party not to find itself “high and dry” with symbolic climate gestures.

It was almost a lone voice, as the House of Lords nodded through the Amendments.

Back in the Commons, the bill was hailed by climate change minister Joan Ruddock as a “triumph for the UK”.

The bill creates an enormous bureaucratic apparatus for monitoring and reporting, which was expanded at the last minute. Amendments by the Government threw emissions from shipping and aviation into the monitoring program, and also included a revision of the Companies Act (c. 46) “requiring the directors’ report of a company to contain such information as may be specified in the regulations about emissions of greenhouse gases from activities for which the company is responsible” by 2012.

Recently the American media has begun to notice the odd incongruity of saturation media coverage here which insists that global warming is both man-made and urgent, and a British public which increasingly doubts either to be true. 60 per cent of the British population now doubt the influence of humans on climate change, and more people than not think Global Warming won’t be as bad “as people say”.

Both figures are higher than a year ago – and the poll was taken before the non-summer of 2008, and the (latest) credit crisis.

Yet anyone looking for elected representatives to articulate these concerns will have been disappointed. Instead, representatives had a higher purpose – demonstrating their virtue. And for the first 90 minutes of the marathon debate, the new nobility outdid each other with calls for tougher pledges, or stricter monitoring. Gestures are easy, so no wonder MPs like making them so much.

It was all deeply sanctimonious, but no one pointed out that Europe’s appetite for setting targets that hurt the economy has evaporated in recent weeks – so it’s a gesture few countries will feel compelled to imitate.

The US Senate has Senator James Inhofe, but in the Commons, there wasn’t an out-and-out sceptic to be found. It was 90 minutes before anyone broke the liturgy of virtue. When Peter Lilley, in amazement, asked why there hadn’t been a cost/benefit analysis made of such a major change in policy, he was told to shut up by the Deputy Speaker.

(And even Lilley – one of only five out of 653 MPs to vote against the Climate Bill in its second reading – felt it necessary to pledge his allegiance to the Precautionary Principle.)

It fell to a paid-up member of Greenpeace, the Labour MP Rob Marris, to point out the Bill was a piece of political showboating that would fail. While professing himself a believer in the theory that human activity is primarily the cause of global warming, he left plenty of room for doubt – far more than most members. The legislation was doomed, Marris said.

Marris had previously supported the 60 per cent target but thought that 80 per cent, once it included shipping and aviation, wouldn’t work. We could have a higher target, or include shipping and aviation, but not both.

He compared it to asking someone to run 100m in 14 seconds – which they might consider something to train for. Asking someone to run it in ten seconds just meant people would dismiss the target:

“The public will ask ‘why should we bother doing anything at all?’”

Out of bounds

The closest thing to a British Inhofe is Ulsterman Sammy Wilson, Democratic Unionist Party, who’d wanted a “reasoned debate” on global warming, rather than bullying, and recently called environmentalism a “hysterical psuedo-religion”. Wilson described the Climate Bill as a disaster, but even colleagues who disagree with his views of environmentalism are wary of the latest amendments.

The Irish Republic is likely to reap big economic gains if it doesn’t penalise its own transport sector as fiercely as the UK pledges to penalise its own in the bill. Most Ulster MPs were keenly aware of the costs, and how quickly the ports and airports could close, when a cheaper alternative lies a few miles away over the border.

Tory barrister Christopher Chope professed himself baffled by the logic of including aviation and shipping. If transportation was made more expensive, how could there be more trade?

“As we destroy industry we’ll be more dependent on shipping and aviation for our imports!” he said.

“When the history books come to be written people will ask why were the only five MPs… who voted against this ludicrous bill,” he said. It would tie Britain up in knots for years, all for a futile gesture, Chope thought.

However, Tim Yeo, the perma-suntanned Tory backbencher who wants us to carry carbon rationing cards, said it would “improve Britain’s competitiveness”. He didn’t say how.

Lilley impertinently pointed out that no cost/benefit case had been made for handicapping shipping and aviation. It was the first mention in the chamber of the cost of the commitments being discussed. Estimates put the total cost of the Climate Change Bill at £210bn, or £10,000 per household – potentially twice the benefits.

Quoting Nordhaus, Lilley noted that Stern (“Lord Stern – he got his reward”) had only got his front-loaded benefits by using improbable discount rates – and then only half the benefits of making drastic carbon reductions will kick in by the year 2800. The government has said it wasn’t using Stern’s discount rates to calculate the cost of shipping and aviation restrictions, but a more sensible and traditional rate of 3.5 per cent instead – yet it refused to reveal the costs. Lilley asked:

“I ask the house – is it sensible to buy into an insurance policy where the premiums are twice the value of the house?”

Stop right there, heretic.

Liilley was “building a broad case on a narrow foundation”, the Deputy Speaker told him. “I really must direct him to the specific matter that’s included in these clauses and amendments.”

Earlier, the Tories had said they would be tougher on carbon than Labour, and the Lib Dems the toughest of the lot. Much more representative of the tone of the debate was Nia Griffith, the NuLab MP for Lanelli.

Her comments are worth repeating (Hansard link to follow today) because language tells us a lot – not only about the bureaucratic ambitions of the exercise, but how the modern politician thinks about governing.

Griffith told the House that the Bill was “a process not an end in itself”, and had great value as a “monitoring tool”.

MP Nia Griffith

“It’s the targets that make us think,” she said. She also used the phrase “raise consciousness” – as in, “it must raise consciousness amongst nations that follow suit.”

In other words, if you take a gesture, then pile on targets and penalties, you will change people’s behaviour. Maybe she hasn’t heard of Goodhart’s law.

Yesterday, however, it seemed that the only MPs exhibiting enough “consciousness” to actually think – and ask reasonable questions about cost and effectiveness of the gesture – got a good telling off.

The Bill finally passed its third reading by 463 votes to three.

“We’ll certainly have it in fifty years,” ITER’s Neil Calder told the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation last week. But not if Greenpeace has its way.

Yes, the fuel for fusion is abundant, and far more productive than fossil fuel – one litre of seawater can produce as much as 30 litres of petrol. It’s much safer than nuclear fission. And it doesn’t release CO2. So what’s the problem?

“Governments should not waste our money on a dangerous toy,” Jan Van de Putte of Greenpeace International said when ITER was announced in 2005. Van de Putte predicted it will never be efficient – so why bother?

Spokesperson Bridget Woodman said: “Nuclear fusion has all the problems of nuclear power, including producing nuclear waste and the risks of a nuclear accident.”

(Which must break the record for the number of false and contradictory assertions you can cram into a 17-word sentence. But that’s par for the course these days. When you hear a phrase like “sustainable energy” the opposite is usually intended – the speaker is referring to an energy source that won’t sustain anything for very long or very reliably.)

Greenpeace began life as a citizens’ group devoted to fighting pollution and the whaling industry, but it’s now a powerful de-industrialisation lobby. Its hostility to progress snags it well over $200m income a year. If a scientific breakthrough promises a better of quality of life, then the organisation is probably against it.

Two of Greenpeace’s co-founders, Patrick Moore and Paul Watson long since departed: Watson to run his own anti-whaling group and Moore criticising its anti-human, anti-development agenda. “By the mid-1980s, the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism,” Moore lamented.

Fusion seems to exemplify what Moore means: an anti-modernity superstition. Greenpeace doesn’t understand what fusion is, but whatever it is it will be scary, it will be bad, and it must be stopped. ®

Whither, then, Peak Oil?

In a wide-ranging interview, Dr Pike talked about energy independence, Peak Oil, and how to educate our scientifically illiterate elites.

Before becoming chief executive of the RCS, Pike spent twenty five years in the oil industry. His background hasn’t prevented him from calling for alternative energy sources to fossil fuels, and making criticisms that have embarrassed industry executives, latterly over the amount of oil lost to leakages.

But the most intriguing argument is that we’re simply not told the truth about how long oil supplies will last. Conventional wisdom reports the oil reserves as 1.2 trillion barrels. There’s far more than the oil companies report. This is neither cock-up nor conspiracy, he says, but a combination of conservative reporting, a failure to understand probability theory, and consequently a lack of understanding of the figures actually mean. Oil engineers and planners have their own – these are figures we don’t see.

The figure quoted when oil companies declare their reserves is a “P90” figure, which means an oil reserve has been discovered, the oil in it is recoverable, and the estimate has a 90 per cent chance of being exceeded. This is always on the conservative side. Another figure, the P50 estimate refers to “proven but possible” oil reserves, and is rarely quoted. P50 can exceed P90 by a factor of two or three, and often reflects the output more accurately. So why don’t we hear P50, rather than P90?

“P90 is a lower bound, and companies have a duty to report what the lower bound is to statutory bodies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, and BERR in the UK,” says Pike. And that figure is conservative.

“Over time, ‘lower bound’ has come to mean ‘proven reserves’. But it’s actually the extreme left hand side of the probability curves.”

Pike illustrates this with the example of throwing dice.

The oil man’s odds

“If you add together the estimates of thousands of reserves, you’re taking the lower bound each time. Say you throw a dice: The probability of throwing one is one in six. With two dice, you’ll be above one 97 per cent of the time. With three, it’s 99.4 per cent of the time. So if you throw thousands of dice, the chances of you getting all ones are infinitesimally small. But this is what oil companies are doing in their statutory reporting.

“The statutory bodies will effectively say, ‘We don’t want some complicated probability analysis on what P90 is, just give us the straight simple number.”

Then other bodies, such as the Peak Oil eschatologists (“the end of the world is nigh…”), take the number and use it for something else.

Pike blames the compartmentalisation of the industry – engineers rarely make it to executive level and the people at the top never get to understand probabilistic analysis.

Inside the oil companies themselves, he points out, they’ll often use the probabilistic approach – whether when estimating their own prospects, or eyeing up a rival in an M&A analysis.

So why do they do it, then?

“You could say it protects shareholders,” says Pike. “It opens up a whole range of information they feel uncomfortable with, opening up a range of secrets. But there’s a balance there to be struck.”

Pike first raised the issue in 2006, and the reaction has been intriguing.

“There’s a subterranean dialog going on on the internet – there are literally now thousands of websites carrying this discussion. On the blogs, there are a lot of engineers who agree.”

Yet the reaction is very different amongst the policy-making elite.

“I’ve talked to some senior civil servants who said they were completely unaware of this probabilistic effect – so we’re intrigued there’s all this stuff going on at the more intellectual level, but at the higher level there’s absolutely nothing at all.

“For the most part, it’s been seen as a mathematical or scientific story, not so much a business or or social, or socio-economic issue.”

Or maybe, we wondered, some people prefer the End Times thrill of discussing Peak Oil, with its undercurrents of cataclysmic social upheaval. A good time to head for the bunker, and see what Pike thought of the Peak Oil debate.
Oiling the Peak

Peak Oil refers to the moment when oil reserves “peak”, and from which point on, less will be extracted. Dr Pike isn’t impressed with the numerical calculations.

“There’s a lot of ill-informed discussion about it. You see books where people say the oil ‘has half gone’. There hasn’t been enough analysis to say where economically the Peak will be. There has to be Peak at some stage, but it’s ill informed.”

“Well, so far 1 trillion barrels has been produced in history, and using the conventional accounting of reserves, you have 1.2 trillion barrels left. So that’s the reason for saying it’s half gone. What I’m arguing is that there’s probably 2 to 2.5 trillion left, then there will be other reserves from things called “resources” which are probably not economic at this stage. So rather than being half gone it could be just a quarter gone.”

The Peak Oil doomsayers have underestimated the capacity constraints.

“You can relax the constraints. Oil is finite, but there’s this balance between how much you spend, and the flow.”

How so?

“You can buy your way out of capacity constraints. If you’ve got a big tank of oil, and you’ve got one tap, then the tap is the constraint. If you add more taps, then you slowly discover whether there’s something in that tank that’s a constraint. It’s the same with Peak Oil – if you buy your way out of the surface constraints – the number of wells you’ve got, or gas/oil separators, or pipelines, or storage tanks or jetties – all those are constraints and you can buy your way out of that problem.

“The rough rule of thumb that applied three or four years ago was that to get 1m barrels of oil a day extra, you needed to spend in the order of $10bn, very approximately.

“But the payback is extraordinarily quick. When oil is at $140 a barrel, the payback is 100 days. In terms of payback, it’s a no-brainer. Often you find that there would be bottlenecks, and you could find you spend a lot less”.

Another factor overlooked, he points out, is that Middle Eastern producers run their fields at much lower flow rates, to sustain the plateau of production for longer. Rather than plateau for five years, with a twenty year tail, the operator will sustain the plateau for ten or twenty years. This is so that effects of making geological wrong turns – drilling in the wrong place – are less catastrophic.

“Fields are very complex. If you can run things very slowly, and still make a lot of money by running a good field, it’s far better to really plan where you put your wells,” he explains.

Renewables and chemistry

So Pike thinks oil will last longer than most outsiders suppose, but doesn’t dispute that it’s a finite resource.

Long-term, I suggested, energy is probably the least of our problems – there’s so much of it about: Geothermal, fusion, and solar for example.

He agrees, but says a massive amount of international co-operation is needed. No economies are yet geared up for electricity as a direct heating source, or as automotive fuel, or for hydrogen storage.

So what, I wondered, were Pike’s bets for future energy sources?

“My own view – and it’s shared by a lot of people in chemistry – is that solar will eventually be the way ahead. Artificial photosynthesis hasn’t been cracked yet – it’s the idea you use sunlight, the CO2 in the atmosphere, and water, and you make simple molecules like alcohols that you can then burn as a fuel.”

“A lot of the science is there. . But a lot of the advances are going to be in putting things together on a grand scale which requires some very good leadership, because we’re in a position where some of these decisions are not made by individuals or individual companies. It’s going to require a lot of collaboration.”

Is our children learning?

As big a problem, he suggested, was scientific ignorance – amongst politicians and the public.

“I have to admit, although the science is there, there aren’t enough people who readily appreciate the science.

“We’ve been out in the street here and discovered that two thirds of people think it’s smoke that comes out of a cooling tower. It’s steam! Only one per cent of people know what cooling towers are actually for. So you’ve got this terrible lack of scientific literacy amongst the public.”

Only one percent of MPs have a scientific background. And it isn’t helped by what’s going on schools, he adds.

This summer, the Royal Society of Chemistry drew attention to the level of questions being set to 14 year olds on science courses. Pupils were set questions such as “what powers a solar powered snail?” and “what part of the anatomy does a riding hat protect?” There are more examples here.

The course material is often comprehensive, Pike notes, but the examinations barely skim it – and are almost fail-proof. “Kids need to know 16 things such as force and pressure, and how they interrelate. The exam only touched on four, and four of the simplest: Length, temperature, mass and volume. There’s no mention of speed, or amps and volts and power. I find that extraordinary.”

Without better education, the next generation of policy makers is as likely to be as scientifically illiterate as this one. The cycle needs to be broken.

©Situation Publishing 2008.

A study of domestic turbines was published by renewable energy consultants Encraft in December. According to the study, only one of the 15 household wind turbines generated enough to power a 75W light bulb. The average daily output was 393.3 Watt hours: an average of 17W.

In all, only three of the turbines generated over 400 Watt hours of electricity, with one generating 1,790 Watt hours.

Four of the turbines didn’t even make it into three figures. By way of comparison, a washing machine consumes 4kW (4,000W), and a fridge-freezer 1.9kW. [PDF,1MB]

The average turbine also operates at only 1.84 per cent of capacity.

The carbon-obsessed BBC has suggested that a domestic turbine may contribute about “a fifth” of a household’s electricity needs – but the reality is this is only true if the household’s only electricity need is one fifth of a single crack-den-dim light bulb.

Encraft stresses it’s early days, which is true – the first 13 sites only went live last January, with 13 more following in October.

However, it appears that the measured windspeed for many sites fell below the predicted figure. Turbulence in built-up areas makes for poor windflow. Or as SK Watson, of the Centre for Renewable Energy System Technology at Loughborough University, observes:

“Those areas with higher capacity factor are where urban areas tend not to be!”

Worse, the measured energy output from the domestic turbines was far below the “theoretical” energy predicted.

Er, quite.

The trial has suffered other problems. One turbine was stolen, another damaged, and a further one was beseiged by pro-bat protestors. Several needed their inverters replacing.

“We have had some reality checks,” Encraft admits.

However, Encraft MD Matthew Rhodes, quoted in The Guardian found one “benefit” from the white elephants. Apparently, seven out of ten people who see a turbine say it reminds them to save energy.

The logic is, apparently, that when one sees one of these monuments to self-righteousness, one dashes back to turn the lights off.

But surely there must be cheaper ways of inducing feelings of guilt and low self-worth in the general population – such as availing oneself of the latest Radiohead album, perhaps?