A think tank’s study that concludes natural gas and nuclear power are more cost-effective ways to tackle climate change than wind power has caused a row in the United Kingdom, with some media heralding the research while the country’s leading clean energy industry group has denounced it as “based on the work of anti-wind cranks.”

The study [PDF] from the social policy institute Civitas repeats a familiar charge of wind opponents – that because it ebbs and flows and requires fossil-fuel-based backup generating capability, any emissions benefits from wind are limited at best. “Wind power, backed by conventional gas-fired generation, can emit more CO2 than the most efficient gas turbines running alone,” the Civitas study said. Wind becomes even less attractive – because it becomes more expensive – when a cost is placed on the CO2 produced by the backup energy sources, Civitas said.

civitas wind study
image via RWE npower renewables

The Civitas report was authored by Ruth Lea, an economist who in 2009 wrote, “I believe that man-made global warming is a huge con, propelled by clever propagandists who don the green cloak of environmentalism to wreck freedoms and control people’s lives.” But the study’s scientific foundation is built on the work of Colin Gibson, who was director of the U.K.’s electric power transmission network in the 1990s, and Kees le Pair, a Dutch physicist.

For instance, Lea writes: “C. le Pair has recently shown that deploying wind turbines on ‘normal windy days’ in the Netherlands actually increased fuel (gas) consumption, rather than saving it, when compared to electricity generation with modern high-efficiency gas turbines. Ironically and paradoxically the use of wind farms therefore actually increased CO2 emissions, compared with using efficient gas-fired combined cycle gas turbines (CCGTs) at full power.”

This line of attack is similar to the one used in a controversial Bentek Energy study released last year. In what it called “the wind power paradox,” Bentek said its analysis showed that “when power plants on a regional power grid are ‘cycled’ to accept wind energy, the plants run less efficiently, leading to significant emissions and higher plant maintenance costs.”

The Bentek study was challenged by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), which charged it was “directly contradicted by a large body of government data and numerous studies by independent grid operators conclusively showing that the emissions savings of adding wind energy to the grid are substantially larger than had been expected.” Among the study’s chief flaws, the AWEA said, was “that the authors used a method that takes very small snapshots of the power grid in both time and geographic space, and thus overlooks a large share of the emissions savings produced by wind energy.”

civitas wind study
image via RWE npower renewables

Responding to the Civitas study, RenewableUK attacked the credibility and methodology of its primary sources. It said Gibson wrongly assumed that wind power would need to be backed up on a megawatt-for-megawatt basis by an expensive new fleet of rapid-response gas power stations (known as open-cycle gas turbines, or OCGT). “Dedicated OCGT plants are not required to provide back-up for wind,” Gordon Edge, RenewableUK’s director of policy, said in a statement. “Instead, wind can be integrated into our existing electricity system to act as a fuel saver, enabling us to harness the weather when it’s available. Some additional investment is required, but credible analysis puts the cost at one-sixth of Mr Gibson’s inflated claims even with wind providing two-thirds of our power.”

RenewableUK also said the Civitas report makes use of research that hasn’t been subject to peer review, a point also made by Guardian columnist Leo Hickman, whose reporting on the Civitas brouhaha includes a number of experts weighing in to savage the Civitas claims. For instance, Hickman quotes Robert Gross of the U.K. Energy Research Centre saying, “There is also a substantial consensus that the lifecycle carbon emissions associated with the construction and maintaining of wind power are very small compared to those of fossil fuel sources.”