TILTING AT WINDMILLS AND OTHER THINGS

So would you? A windmill, I mean. Would you install a windmill in your garden? I was asking myself this yesterday as I pondered whether I should be making another short haul flight down to the Auverne.

So I Googled ‘windmills’ - or rather ‘small wind turbines’ and lo! it turns out that there are folk ready to sell me a dainty little model on a 10 metre stalk, set in a block of concrete and connected to my fuse box for the measly sum of £9,000.

With my thoughts still on the Auverne I calculate that once £9,000 would have been about €5,000 - now it’s about €10,000 euros - another illustration of how Britain will quickly have to learn how to become self-sufficient for it is rapidly becoming too expensive to buy anything from abroad - like oil, for instance, or gas.

Now £9,000 doesn’t seem unreasonable for a big concrete block in the windward corner of my garden with a windmill on top. I could even see it finally extinguishing the ever expanding Yucca plant with which I am due another skirmish shortly.

Quite indestructible are Yuccas, except perhaps by large amounts of concrete, though I’m told they are a useful plant if you’re about to become self-sufficient. You can weave the fibres into cloth and use the pointed leaves as skewers or needles. Allegedly.

Besides the demise of the Yucca, my windmill would bring me free energy and in addition £0.12 for every kilowatt hour I returned to the grid. Quite a bargain, except that the tables say I live in a spot less windy than the average and therefore that my windmill would supply only one third of the electricity that I use.

What! less that averagely windy? There are times when the wind howls and I fear for my fences. I have already lost half a fig tree. I see from my window that the trees are tossing merrily. On the other hand yesterday it was quite still and for some days before that. So it seems it would take 60 years to get my money back, by which time I shall be dead, if I haven't succumbed to global warming in the meantime.

Still I would have built a windmill if it had been practical. I don’t object to how they look. The turbines high on the northern hills above my town have a certain ghostly elegance. The I thought that perhaps it would be more sensible to let someone else build the windmill and to buy the electricity from them.

So I emailed my current supplier who tells me that if I cut my consumption by 10 per cent I can move to a green tariff. But I haven’t cut my consumption by 10 per cent! And nor am I likely to. Despite my criticisms of the ban on incandescent light bulbs, virtually all the serious lighting in the house is energy saving. I am not going to sit in the dark, nor give up using the oven. And we already turn off at the wall where we can.

True we could go out and buy a new cooker, fridge and dishwasher - but the energy involved in their new manufacture (all that steel to be smelted and rolled from iron ore brought half way round the world, the paint and plastic made from hydrocarbons, the packaging and the overheated showrooms) mean that I’d be starting with a substantial carbon deficit (let alone a bank account deficit) which would require as long to payback as my windmill.

Why is there no requirement to inform us of the carbon cost of new energy saving appliances? Your new car may have low emissions but the factories that made it and brought it to you certainly don’t.

But a post from kind Woozle tells me of another company - Ecotricity - offering to sell me green electricity. Fine - but then I lose the discounts that I get from being with my existing supplier from whom I buy gas as well.

Besides, if I (and fellow eco-warriors) buy up all the green energy everyone else is left with the brown (non-renewable) stuff. I am not actually helping the poor old planet, however virtuous I may feel to be 100 per cent green. Though in fairness to Ecotricity they do say that they invest only in renewable sources of power.

What about gas on which the central heating runs? I’ve a feeling that you should be able to buy green gas, produced from biomass, though I haven’t seen this advertised anywhere. Why not, I wonder? The technology is available to produce gas from digesters and we do discard a vast potential source of biogas every time we visit the bathroom.

Apparently we expend 80 calories in fuel and fertiliser to produce one calorie’s worth of edible food. As someone said once we spend all this money creating this waste and then we just throw it away.

But I am still scratching my head about how best to atone for my flight down to the Auverne next week. There we are greener than here. Our heat comes from great wood burning stoves, our power from French nuclear electricity.

I have never had much fear of nuclear energy. Indeed I see it as much the best short term solution to providing the large amounts of standby power that the world demands. Britain was once a world leader in this field; a place we have sadly long ceded.

Indeed I read only this week that Areva, the French nuclear giant, hopes to build 60 reactors across the world in the next few years, including some in Britain. Demand is fast picking up, they say.

Maybe I shall get my low-carbon electricity after all. Meanwhile, I comfort myself that even with the Auverne trips our carbon footprint is still respectable. Well, just.