BY MARK GREEN

Last updated 11:50, Thursday, 11 September 2008

The Government’s former chief scientific adviser has warned that our turbine charge for windfarms will actually increase the price of our electricity and force up to 500,000 people into the fuel poverty trap.

One of Tony Blair’s last acts as Prime Minister was to sign up to an EU target to have 20 per cent of Europe’s energy from renewable sources by 2020.

This will also lead to price rises, the Government reckons around 10 per cent for electricity and 20 per cent for gas.

Professor Sir David King told a BBC Radio 4 programme the Government is placing too much emphasis on wind power to reach targets which will cause more people to suffer from fuel poverty.

He thinks the EU leaders did not understand what they were committing themselves to and now need to renegotiate a less expensive target.

“If they had said 20 per cent renewables on the electricity grids across the European Union by 2020, we would have had a realistic target but by saying 20 per cent of all energy, I actually wonder whether that wasn’t a mistake.”

The Government’s only alternative to wind is to go nuclear, a decision that will cost us dearly now and for a long, long time in the future.

There has been outcry and mass demonstrations at plans to build new coal-fired power stations in the UK with opponents saying the CO2 emissions will only speed up climate change.

Meanwhile, in Germany, a mini power plant has been developed as a pilot project for carbon capture and storage – the first coal-fired plant in the world ready to capture and store its own CO2 emissions.

The CO2 will be separated, squashed to one 500th of its original volume and squeezed into a cylinder ready to be transported to a gas field and forced 1,000m below the surface where it should stay until long after mankind has stopped worrying about climate change.

Shouldn’t we now be thinking along similar lines?