Gordon Hughes' GWPF report on the costs of wind power contains the following claim:
Meeting the UK Government’s target for renewable generation in 2020 will require total wind capacity of 36 GW backed up by 13 GW of open cycle gas plants plus large complementary investments in transmission capacity – the Wind Scenario. The same electricity demand could be met from 21.5 GW of combined cycle gas plants with a capital cost of £13 billion – the Gas Scenario. Allowing for the shorter life of wind turbines, the comparative investment outlays would be about £120 billion for the Wind Scenario and a mere £13 for the Gas Scenario.
This seems clear to me. The capital cost - see the words there in the middle? -of wind energy is much higher than that of gas.
Now look at how BusinessGreen reports Hughes' work (the article is written by Maria McCaffery, the chief executive of RenewableUK (formerly the British Wind Energy Association):
Among the more absurd assertions put forward in this paper is the contention that wind energy is 10 times more expensive than gas, but his comparison is flawed. He fails to include the cost of gas itself and only includes the cost of building a gas-fired power station and the infrastructure to go with it. As most right minded people know, a gas-fired power station without any gas does not generate any electricity. Perhaps his calculations exclude the cost of gas because the costs of this fossil fuel are so difficult to predict and very volatile. The comparison is certainly not like-for-like and is very misleading.
I think we have established something about the integrity of Renewables UK.