Yesterday Guido revealed in the Sun that while in government Ed Miliband legislated to add £69 a year to every household bill by 2020. We’ve crunched the numbers…

In November 2009 Secretary of State Miliband told the Commons:

“That takes me to the issue of energy, and I repeat that we face big challenges in that area. No one should pretend the scale of the challenge is not huge. Our plans will mean that approximately 10,000 wind turbines will be built between now and 2020, as part of the strategy for achieving 30 per cent. renewable electricity by 2020.”

Well according to Department of Energy and Climate Change in March 2010:

“Onshore wind receives 1 Renewables Obligation Certificate (ROC) per MWh and offshore wind receives 1.5 ROCs per MWh.”

The value of a ROC is estimated at £40.55, dropping to £39.34 by 2015. For simplicity, lets be generous and assume all of Ed’s windmills will be onshore (offshore ones will add even more to the cost). RenewableUK say a modern turbine produces 2.5MW  of electricity an hour. We could say 2MW to be on the safe side, and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. DECC say just 25.6% of the time in fact.

So those 10,000 turbines x 2MW per turbine x 0.256 (load factor) x 8760 (number of available hours in a year) x £40 (subsidy per hour generating) = £1.79bn.

There are 26m households in the UK. So that will £69 per household per year cost. Cheers Ed.