One of the main reasons plants are built in the “wrong places” is the high cost of transporting the electricity to the national grid from the windiest sites, which are often remote. The average load factor necessary to make a wind farm viable is about 30 percent. But some wind farms in the U.K. now operate with load factors of less than 20 percent. Engineering consultant Jim Oswald told the BBC that many turbines underperformed because wind speeds in the U.K. were just “too variable.” Wind power is currently the fastest-growing source of renewable energy in the U.K., but it provides less than 0.5 percent of the nation’s electricity needs.

A few days before the BBC program aired, the British government was embarrassed when a leaked briefing document for its ministers was exposed in The Guardian newspaper. In the document, officials from the Department of Trade and Industry acknowledged that the U.K. “has achieved little so far on renewables” and that even reaching a target of 9 percent – up from the current 2 percent, and at a cost to the economy of 4 billon British pounds per year – would be “challenging.” Perhaps the document’s most damaging point is that renewables are more expensive than the European Emissions Trading Scheme in reducing carbon emissions. And given the rocky year suffered by the trading scheme (see the accompanying story in the sidebar on page 11), that’s saying something.