Government report gives new wind to green energy

Wind power is better than nuclear power stations for tackling global warming, the Government's official environmental advisers will tell Tony Blair this week.

Wind power is better than nuclear power stations for tackling global warming, the Government's official environmental advisers will tell Tony Blair this week.

Their conclusion - after the most comprehensive study of wind energy in Britain - contradicts the Prime Minister's own opinion and could intensify the debate about building new nuclear power stations.

The Sustainable Development Commission's report - financed by the pro-nuclear Department of Trade and Industry - aims to start the fight-back against the increasing drive to build at least 10 new nuclear power stations in Britain. It sets out to correct "systematic misrepresentation" about wind power by influential nuclear advocates.

The Government's advisers on nuclear waste, the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, warned last week that no decision should be taken to build new nuclear stations until it had determined how to dispose of its highly dangerous detritus. Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for the Environment, takes a similar position.

But yesterday the new Secretaryof State for Trade and Industry, Alan Johnson, who replaced the nuclear sceptic Patricia Hewitt, committed himself to reviewing the Government's antagonistic stance on new reactors this year. This follows a leaked memo addressed to him from the department's director-general of energy policy, criticising Mrs Beckett and pressing him to decide on the expansion of nuclear power.

The commission's 176-page report concludes that "wind power, along with other renewables, offers the only truly sustainable domestically sourced option for electric generation over the long term".

Jonathon Porritt, the chairman of the commission, which includes representatives of business and local government, but not environmental groups, adds that it is "trying to provide an antidote to what we see as systematic misrepresentation of the arguments for and against wind power".

The report, to be published on Thursday, concludes that wind energy is quiet, economic and cheaper than nuclear power and, surprisingly, popular with people living near the turbines.

It finds that modern wind turbines, 350 yards away, produce about 35 decibels, the same level of noise as experienced in a "quiet bedroom". And it calculates that it produces power at about the current price of electricity, far less than nuclear power.

It also dismisses a claim by nuclear advocates that wind power is so unreliable that it will require expensive back-up from new conventional or nuclear power stations.