The chief executive of the UK's wind industry trade body has admitted that England simply isn't windy enough to justify building any more new wind farms.
Hugh McNeal's astonishing revelation has been reported in the Telegraph confirming that while offshore still presented several opportunities it simply wasn't cost effective to keep building onshore farms in England.
“We are almost certainly not talking about the possibility of new plants in England. The project economics wouldn’t work; the wind speeds don’t allow for it." said McNeal.
While onshore wind might take a hit, there are still strong arguments for the UK's numerous offshore wind farms which currently produce 4 per cent of the UK's energy.
The hope is that this will double by 2020 along with a huge increase in the number of jobs that the industry would require.
Currently employing around 13,000 people, the increases in scale could lead to the creation of almost 30,000 new jobs in the next decade.
One of the major concerns around building wind farms, onshore in particular, is the sheer cost effectiveness of doing it.
England isn't particularly windy, and so the cost effectiveness of each turbine goes down. On top of that experts point out that wind requires a considerable increase in infrastructure.
“There has to be grid expansion to remove bottlenecks, short term response plant and or demand to cope with errors in the wind forecast, and the cost of operating a conventional fleet of almost unchanged size to guarantee security of supply,” claims John Constable, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation.