asked the Secretary of State for Energy what estimate he has made of the number of windmills required, and the number of hundreds of square miles of windswept territory in the United Kingdom the windmills would need to occupy for aerodynamic reasons, to provide the megawatt equivalent of one average modern nuclear power station; and what the capital cost of such a proposal might be.

I am advised that 750 to 3,000 aerogenerators placed on the most favourable sites could give an annual electricity output equal to that from a 1,320 megawatts nuclear power station. These sites are dispersed, but where machines could be concentrated a density of two to three per square mile might be achieved. The capital cost of these machines would be approximately £1,100 mi lion.