Reply #19: It is cost vs production

[kristopher]

The 50km offshore wind speeds are significantly higher than onshore - and that is more important that you would intuitively think. It results in an average increase in productivity (for the same turbine sited ashore) of 30-40%.

To give you an idea this is from an old spreadsheet. The left column is wind speed in meters/sec the right column is output of a GE 3.6MW turbine.

05.80------233.72
07.61------743.45
09.42-----1454.40
10.96-----2163.87
12.00-----2662.00
13.67-----3471.01


The real problem is a recent right tilt towards "maximal individual freedom and a free-market economy, with low taxation" in the government. As the article in the OP notes, when externalities are accounted for wind simply isn't expensive relative to other sources of generation.

Not exactly Dutch courage
The new government unveils its uninspiring vision for the country

Oct 7th 2010 | THE HAGUE | from the print edition

MEET the Netherlands. A small, affluent, densely populated northern European country, economically timid, with the potential for ethnic strife simmering just under its quiet surface. That is the picture painted by the agreement underlying the new Dutch centre-right minority government, consisting of the liberal VVD and the Christian Democrats. With the backbench support of the far-right Freedom Party and its leader, Geert Wilders (see Charlemagne), the new government will have a majority of just one in the 150-seat parliament.

Mr Wilders has extracted a range of policy goodies in return for his support. The new government will ban the face-covering Islamic veil, and forbid police and workers in judicial institutions from wearing the headscarf. Immigration via marriage will be curbed. State subsidies for newcomers’ language courses will be turned into loans, and a failure to pass the subsequent tests could become grounds for a refusal to grant residence permits.

The agreement is long on heavy-handed police tactics as a response to crime-ridden ethnically mixed neighbourhoods, but has nothing to say about poor infrastructure, school drop-out rates, skills shortages and low social mobility among both immigrants and natives in such areas.

More surprisingly, the government has shunned any serious attempts at structural economic reform. Mark Rutte, leader of the VVD and prime minister-in-waiting, campaigned on a pledge to revitalise the Dutch economy. But no substantial effort will be made to reform either the labour market or the inflated government-subsidised housing market. The generous pension system will remain, and the pension age will creep up by just a year, from 65 to 66, and then not until 2020. “This must be the most conservative and anti-reform economic programme we have had in the past 40 years,” says Sweder van Wijnbergen, professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam.

And despite the professed radical liberalism of both the VVD and Mr Wilders...

http://www.economist.com/node/17204823



See this for a description of the slant of the various parties.
http://www.expatica.com/nl/essentials_moving_to/country_facts/Whats-liberal-politics-in-the-Netherlands_16192.html