Renewable Energy Foundation

Following a recent and unfortunately misleading article in the Sunday Telegraph (08.12.13) by Christopher Booker there has been a certain amount of renewed comment on Professor Gordon Hughes’ work concerning the economic lifetime of wind turbines, work that used empirical performance data gathered by REF. This comment includes blog postings by Bishop Hill and Roger Helmer MEP, to which Professor David Mackay, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change has responded personally with online comments, by releasing a draft paper criticising Professor Hughes’ work, and also with an extended blog posting on his own site.

The following statement comments on the extent and significance of the disagreement with Professor Mackay. For the avoidance of doubt, readers should be aware that Professor Hughes does not accept Professor Mackay’s criticisms of the statistical methods employed in his analysis, criticisms which he regards as ill-informed, and unconstructive.
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Appendix A

Appendix B

In May this year the Institute of Acoustics (IoA) published a study, A Good Practice Guide to the Application of ETSU-R-97 for the Assessment and Rating of Wind Turbine Noise (hereafter Good Practice Guide) on how to assess the probable noise impacts on neighbours of a proposed wind power installation. REF has a long established interest in this field, which bears directly on public acceptance of wind power, and we submitted Freedom of Information (FoI) requests to both DECC and the IoA. The responses we have received to date are published here.
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DECC Emails re IoA GPG 2013-09-03

REF analysis of trends in the deployment of solar photovoltaic technology in the UK has been used in a press story today in the Sunday Telegraph (23.06.13) with an editorial comment. Since the development trend towards very large solar revealed by the analysis seems to be surprising to many, we are publishing the following details.

REF has today written to the Secretary of State at DECC concerning the decision to charge stakeholders and members of the public to attend the launch of the wind farm noise guidance. The consultation and launch of the guidance is under the auspices of the Institute of Acoustics but was instigated and subsidised by Government. 
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REF Letter to DECC 24 April 2013

REF has today written to the president of the Institute of Acoustics, Professor Bridget Shield, with the warning that the forthcoming IOA Good Practice Guide on Wind Turbine Noise will be valueless and lack credibility unless the underlying primary data providing the evidence base for the recommended methodology and conclusions underpinning the guidance is also published to enable independent validation. 
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REF Letter to IoA President 19 April 2013

REF publishes today a research paper by Dr Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh, on the performance over time of wind farms in the United Kingdom and Denmark.  The paper can be downloaded by clicking on the link below.  The UK and Danish data used in the analysis is also available below. The following summarises the results of the research.

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Attachments:

Raw Data Denmark (18 MB)

Performance of Wind Farms in the UK and Denmark

Raw Data UK (3 MB)

REF has responded to the Wiltshire Council consultation on separation distances between houses and wind turbines in the proposed Amendment to the Council's Core Policy 42.
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REF Wiltshire Consultation Response Oct 2012

REF has responded to the Insitute of Acoustics' consultation on their discussion document entitled  “A Good Practice Guide to the Application of ETSU-R-97 for Wind Turbine Noise Assessment”.
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REF IoA Consultation Response

In the publication Shortfall, Rebound, Backfire REF raised the issue of misleading statistical information from the Department of Energy and Climate Change, specifically that the headline statements, including those of the then Secretary of State, Mr Huhne, to the House of Commons, were misleading. It was stated that the net effect of the UK's climate change policies would be to reduce the average household energy bill in 2020, whereas close reading of the Department's own models showed clearly that 65% of households were expected to see their bills increase. REF raised this issue in correspondence with the UK Statistics Authority. The correspondence is as follows.
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REF correspondence with UKSA

REF has responded to the call for evidence on the Economics of Wind Power from the Energy and Climate Change Committee.
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REF Evidence to ECC 22.06.12