David Jones MP, Brian Christley, and Physics

There's good reason to be very afraid of the world we live in. Here's a single specific contribtor to my feelings.

Take a look at this http://davidjonesblog.com/2009/12/04/spinning-in-the-wind/

This guy is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Clwyd West.

He has made a horrible mistake in his analysis that I spotted within 1 minute.

"with an output of 90MW, Rhyl Flats will serve the electricity needs of 60,000 households. However, as my friend Brian Christley observes, you don’t have to be a senior wrangler to work out that that equates to only 1,500 watts per household – insufficient to boil a kettle. And that’s only when the wind is blowing."

A typical house will use about 4Mwh of electricity in a year. This works out to be about 500watts. A typical wind farm generates around 30% of the time (30% of its total theoretical maximum output). Of course 30% of 1,500watts is about 500watts. The fact that this average power statistic is insufficient to boil a whole kettle is completely irrelevant. Not the mention the fact that he seems to be implying a kettle is something insignificant: it's one of the most energy intensive appliances in the whole house by a long way.

So, who's his advisor giving him his figures? A personal called Brian Christley from Abergele who posted his detailed analysis on a web forum.

Brian Christley is a serial letter writer to UK newspapers. For some reason his letters are often printed. He's not an expert on science yet is being quoted by an Member of Parliament.

Brian comes out with such clangers as...

"79% of the electrical power the grid makes available each day isn't used - if this surplus (off-peak free) power could be used..."

"that one unit of wind power saves a unit of fossil fuel...which is technically impossible"

"As fossil fuels have to be burnt before power is generated, if ten million of us don't switch on our kettles tonight, our power station will still burn the same amount of fuel."

"As no power station in Britain has or will ever reduce the amount of fossil fuel it consumes as a direct result of the availability of wind power, all wind is actually doing is duplicating power we have already burnt fossil fuel to produce."

I've no idea what power duplication is but Brian is very fond of it. It has been pointed out to him that Lenz's Law and conversation of energy prohibit this but this advice has been ignored and his lies continue across the internet and in print.

The problem is that if you use bad science to "prove" a point and get caught you devalue any good science you call upon in the future and put science as a whole at risk.