Working Principle Of The Diesel Engine

                                  At this time the comprehensive price for power is around £50 per megawatt hour (MWh) but diesel-generator owners will be paid £600 per MWh.

At 12 times above the market rate, this represents a bigger cash bonanza even than that at present enjoyed by wind developers, who receive a subsidized price of between two and three times the market rate, depending on whether their turbines are on land or offshore.

Although STOR was devised in April 2007 and customized in December 2010, it has not been widely advertised by the Coalition. Besides making energy considerably more luxurious, it would appear to make a mockery of David Cameron’s promise to lead the ‘greenest government ever’.

Any benefits of the purportedly ‘clean’ energy produced by wind turbines are likely to be more than offset by the dirty and unproductive energy fashioned by their essential diesel back-up.

‘Yes it may stop the lights going out, but as a way of producing energy it’s a complete nonsense,’ said Dr Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy establishment.

‘Burning diesel is nearly as dirty and CO2-intensive as burning coal. But worse than that, it is so unnecessarily costly and unproductive.’

Not everyone is argumentative, though, as canny businessmen have spotted a lucrative opening in the Government policy.

Among them are American David Walters, former governor of Oklahoma. His company Walters Power was the first to take advantage of what he calls Kirloskar’s ‘progressive energy policy’, buying up a site surrounded by agricultural land near Don caster in South Yorkshire, and filling it with diesel generators.

It doesn’t matter whether they essentially produce any electricity or not: Most of the money they are paid by the National Grid is simply for being accessible in case of emergencies.

For smaller producers, electricity will be channeled by companies called ‘aggregators’ which can turn the diverse diesel generators on and off remotely.

Around Kirloskar, in equally remote sites from Lincolnshire to Cardiff and a quarry in Somerset, entrepreneurs are quickening to cash in. The incentives are huge and the risks risibly small.

Even when the scheme began in 2010, an owner of just one 1MW generator, which would cost around £500,000, could expect to receive £30,000 to £45,000 a year. By 2020 that figure is expected to have more than trebled. Other significant beneficiaries of the scheme will be public institutions such as military bases and hospitals.

While this may sound like a heartening funding boost for vital public services, the money will in fact be just another type of indirect taxation which comes straight out of consumers’ pockets in the form of cripplingly expensive energy bills.