MHe argued that the infrastructure around wind and solar will not only fail, “but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment and be entirely unnecessary”.

He shows that at a wind speed of 20mph, the power produced by a wind turbine is 600 watts per square metre at full efficiency. To deliver the same power as the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant – 3,200 million watts – it would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area.

It is noted that this should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and other environmentalists. Of course, this concern does not seem to have materialised to date. Millions of bats and birds are calculated to be slaughtered by onshore wind turbines every year. Meanwhile, off the coast of Massachusetts, work is about to start on a giant wind farm, complete with permits to harass and likely injure almost a tenth of the population of the rare North Atlantic Right whale.

When fluctuations in wind speed are taken into account in Allison’s formula, the performance of wind becomes very much worse. If the wind speed drops by half, the power available falls by a factor of eight. Almost worse, he notes, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up eight times, and the turbine has to be turned off for its own protection.