So Who Makes All The Money Out Of The Green Windmills Then?
THERE is, as we all know, a campaign to cover the entire country plus the seas around it with windmills. Various reasons for this have been put forward: there are those who watched Hitchcock’s “The Birds” once too often and thus want them all sliced up seems the most logical. There’s even a truly hysterical conspiracy theory that there’s some sort of problem with plant food in the atmosphere and that thus we have to stop using cheap and convenient power and only use the lights when the wind is blowing.
Ludicrous, obviously.
But the real truth is that it’s all a campaign to make our own dear Queen rich.
One of the things about windmills is that you’ve got to have a piece of land that you can plonk it down on. And as anyone who has ever dealt with a landlord can tell you, the owner of that piece of land is going to want a pretty chunky piece of the action for not insisting “Ger Orff Moi Land”. The general rule of thumb currently is that 10% of the entire revenue of the windmill goes to the toothless peasant who owns the scrub underneath the bird chopper. Plus as many pieces of Golden Eagles as he wants to stew up of course.
Most of that gross revenue doesn’t come from the electricity we get to use, of course: the majority is plucked from our pockets through the subsidies given to the technology, meaning that we’re paying the peasant for the electricity we don’t get.
But what has this to do with our own dear Queen? Well, given the shortage or rural oiks who are willing to have the noisy towers over their hovels, the next bright idea is to put them offshore. In the shallow waters around the country. And guess who owns that land?
The Crown Estate owns a diverse collection of assets including Regent Street, shopping centres, most of Britain’s coastline and seabed, £1bn of farmland and forests, and Ascot racecourse.
Yup, the Crown Estate and the Queen’s new deal is that she gets 15% of the profits of that estate. So, we pay lots for ‘leccie from windmills, the windmills are on the seabed owned by the Crown Estate, the profits go to Brenda.
Aren’t we lucky little subjects?
Posted: 7th, July 2011 | In: Reviews Comments (6) | TrackBack | Permalink
