Britain’s offshore wind farms are a clear and present danger to vital air defences, with the Labour Government forced to spend an astonishing £1.5 billion in the next two years to try to guarantee the integrity of the country’s early warning radar network. Wind turbines cause havoc with radar since the rotating blades create Doppler shifts that hinder detection of enemy aircraft, drones and missiles. The problem has been known about for some time but it is getting worse as turbine blades get larger. There is no guarantee that the enormous sums recently allocated will fix the problems despite amounting to 2.5% of the entire annual UK defence budget of around £60 billion.
The money is a complete waste of course and only necessary because politicians are clinging to an increasing discredited Net Zero fantasy. It need hardly be pointed out the £1.5 billion could bring back the winter fuel payment to the over-65s, a project dear to the heart of many Labour supporters, or it could remove the punitive education tax levied on 6% of children educated outside the state system. The annual budget of the RAF is not disclosed but it is thought to be around £15 billion. The money spent on trying to fix the radar is therefore 10% of the annual funding of the air force and it would buy a squadron of Typhoon fighter jets.
And the costly fix might not work. No definitive solution to radar corruptions seems to have been achieved and the problem is getting worse as the political demands for more renewable energy are leading to much larger revolving blades. It is thought that the money will be spent on a number of mitigating attempts including computer fixes, radar upgrades, alternative sensors and the use of specialised materials on blades to reduce radar clutter. Alas, none of these attempted solutions are proven to fully eradicate the growing problem. Coming further down the track are floating wind turbines which further complicate radar tracking due to positional variability.
Details of the £1.5 billion Project Njord are to be found in the recently-published Ministry of Defence Acquisition Pipeline document. Seven separate amounts of £210 million under the heading “The procurement of Mitigation Solution(s) to negate the adverse effects of offshore wind farms on AD radars” are being given to RAF radar stations from Saxa Vord in Shetland to Portreath on the coast of Cornwall. The five other stations involved in the project are Saxton Wood in North Yorkshire, Benbecula in the Hebrides, Neatishead in Norfolk, Brizlee Wood in Northumberland and Buchan in Aberdeenshire. It is understood that the work has been awarded to six suppliers and around 14 mitigation solutions are involved.
Although the problem of wind turbine radar corruption has been acknowledged in the past, the agreed political narrative has been that the offshore wind business can be rolled out with larger machines and a solution guaranteeing national security can be found. This approach has been found wanting in the past and it appears that a desperate attempt is being made to find a workable solution by throwing a vast amount of new money at the radar problem. Money that could have been spent on national defence at a time of heightened political tension and a possible reduction of American support is being hosed at yet another self-inflicted problem caused by unreliable renewable energy projects. As with most matters Net Zero, vast sums of money are required to keep the show on the road whether it be pointless, unproven carbon capture schemes (£22 billion over 20 years) or subsidies to produce uneconomic wind and solar energy (£15 billion every year).
The UK is aiming to produce 50 GW of electricity from offshore turbines by 2030, but this is likely to conflict with the imperative to maintain a robust and reliable radar defence system. The news of the MoD’s significant spend shows that that the security matter is being taken seriously in Whitehall, although the lack of a guaranteed fix, despite years of research, must raise national security concerns. But Net Zero-obsessed politicians such as Energy Minister Ed Miliband are likely to press forward by encouraging ever larger offshore projects with blades as high as 180 metres sweeping the surrounding environment. Already there are nearly 3,000 offshore turbines around the UK, with hundreds that are taller than the Gherkin building in the City of London. Although onshore turbines have been given the go-ahead, a crowded island like the UK and growing political pushback on Net Zero means that future growth will remain difficult to achieve.
In fact the radar problem might eventually have to be solved by a costly transfer of ground facilities to the air. Professor Justin Bronk is a leading expert on air power and technology and he recently noted that unless there was a “breakthrough” in mitigating the effect of wind turbines on ground-based radar, “Britain is going to need a more capable airborne detection service”.
Having a back-up system available at enormous expense is of course a regular feature whenever cranky Net Zero projects are being pursued.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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