Myers: "Wind power will return us to the early Middle Ages"

SURELY the most moving sight in this Ireland of the Global Warming is the picket outside the power station in Lanesboro by Bord na Mona employees, demanding overtime payment for the period when the power station was closed for repairs and they weren't making their usual nighttime deliveries of turf.

Yes, they want to be paid for not having to get up in the middle of the night. Illogical? Quite the reverse, for the picket is every bit as logical as our overall energy policy, which is predicated on two very clear principles.

The first is to subsidise green-energy production, such as wind power, in order to reduce the production of greenhouse gases generated by fossil fuels.

The second is to subsidise the burning of the CO2-emitting fossil fuel peat, both to satisfy some ancient Fianna Fail instinct that the bog is pure, as well as to keep the Taoiseach's electors happy. Thus, a uniquely Irish tragedy, a Bord na Mona power station -- the unburnable in the unheatable.

Either way, the Government's electricity levy (€33 for homes, €99 for small businesses) is subsidising the two contradictory forms of energy. €78m underwrites uneconomic, wasteful, carbon dioxide-spewing, peat-burning power stations, while €43m goes to pious Rosary-muttering wind power.

And see that €33 per home? It's not really €33 at all. If you're like me, you're paying 56pc tax, which means that you have to earn €70 to be able to pay €33. The chances are that you'll have expended some more energy earning that €70. Which means that we are expending extra energy in order to keep an energy-inefficient, CO2-vomiting power station in service, even though we have been told by the European Commission to cut greenhouse gases by 20pc from 2005 levels.

Moreover, the Government has committed itself to making 30pc of our energy from 'renewables' -- which probably ranks alongside such well-seasoned commitments as draining the Shannon, restoring the Irish language and achieving national unity.

But surely, wind is the way forward? It certainly is -- forward to a winter in which the dolorous, the dim and the dumb die in the dark. Because if we'd depended on wind technology to stay warm last winter, we'd have all perished in the coldest spell in 150 years, during which there was more wind on the moon than here in Ireland.

You can check on the lack of winds these days yourself (Eirgrid.com), but let's take one day at random: August 8. That Sunday at 8.15am, wind power provided just seven megawatts of energy, against a forecast wind-energy supply of 58mw. So we were only getting some 12.5pc of expected wind energy, but our actual energy needs were 2,034mw. Wind was therefore supplying just 0.34pc of energy needs -- one third of one percent. Welcome to wind power and the early Middle Ages.

And yes, I'm all in favour of wind power, but it's a pious icing on the cake of the 24 x 365 substantive power that we actually need. And here in holy Ireland, the source for that may legally not be nuclear, according to one of those reflex spasms of parliamentary virtue which have generally characterised the workings of Dail Eireann.

Yet not long ago, a Green minister signed the agreement to import electricity from Britain, although this must inevitably must contain nuclear-generated elements.

But this sort of nonsense is not new. As far back as 1999, Emmet Stagg of Labour fretted about how it might be possible for us to buy electricity from Northern Ireland (which we did and do) without some of it being nuclear. Looking the gift horse in the mouth, he saw some troubling masonry beyond the molars.

"If this problem is not addressed, we will run into a stone wall," he prognosticated sagely, before asking of Mary O'Rourke: "How will the minister prevent nuclear power being generated here through the interconnector?"

The Deputy from Kildare presumably thought that the origin of electrons in a national power grid might be identified, possibly with tiny cattle brands, and Mary O'Rourke could sit astride the interconnector like a cowpoke at a corral, selecting the good electrons for virtuous Ireland and sending the nasty, nuclear electrons back to perfidious old Albion.

With such an uncertain grasp of both language and of science, no doubt we shall soon be demanding radiation-free, wind-powered X-ray scanners to be operated by our very own brand order of ecological nursing nuns, The Little Green Virgins of Perpetual Coitus.

BUYING Britain's surplus energy, which has been created by their nuclear industry, but then insisting that none of it is nuclear, is of course illogical, although it is consistent with a chronic dependency on Britain for lots of adult things, such as defence, abortions, television and emigration.

But then it's not particularly logical to make the generation of electricity by nuclear power a criminal offence, as we have done. And it is equally illogical to subsidise one thoroughly uneconomic energy-creating system, solely because it doesn't create any carbon dioxide, while subsidising another extremely uneconomic energy-creating system that produces vast amounts of the stuff.

Indeed, by such standards, those fine fellows in Lanesboro who are demanding overtime for staying in bed are the very embodiment of pure reason.

kmyers@independent.ie

- Kevin Myers