… but JAMES DELINGPOLE says the idea these giants will solve our energy problems is simply hot air.
What could be more clean and natural than harvesting energy from the power of wind using gigantic turbines? Environmentalists have dreamed of this since at least the Thirties, when a Nazi German inventor called Dr Franz Lawaszeck theorised how to solve his country’s energy problems at a stroke.
He wrote: ‘Wind power, using the cost-free wind, can be built on a large scale. Improved technology will, in the future, make it no more expensive than thermal power . . . the wind towers must be at least 100 metres high, the higher the better, ideally with rotors 100 metres in diameter.’
Wind power was all the rage among Nazis, many of whom shared the party’s fanatical commitment to the environment. Other big fans included Hitler’s favourite commando, Otto Skorzeny.
After an eventful war — which included springing Mussolini from his mountain-top jail in a daring glider operation and planning a (happily abortive) assassination attempt on Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin — the plucky SS-Obersturmbannführer settled in Spain where he spent his later years campaigning on behalf of the nascent wind industry.
Read the rest in the Daily Mail.
