Gnomepak was extremely upset. “Only last month,” he said to the king of the fairies, “I pointed out that the idea of planting windmills all over our kingdom would make neither economic sense nor do anything for our quality of life.
“We are proud of our countryside and we have enough intrusions as it is. Windmills all over the place will do nothing for the landscape!”
“Now I’ve heard that the great controller of energy says we must increase our dependence on what he calls renewables.
“So all of those people in packland who make gossamer film or weave nice flax baskets to hold all our products will be expected to pay extra money towards extra windmills.
“This means that the elves who work on the far side of the world in the giant rice pudding basin will be able to make their packets even cheaper. And we will have to build more job centres in our own land.
Gnomepak shook his head in sorrow. “All the scribes on our daily news parchments are saying just how wonderful these windmills are but the sages in science land can’t produce any evidence to suggest that they will answer all our problems.
“Nobody seems to know how many windmills we will need, how many we can make, how long it will take and how much energy they will produce, especially on nice sunny days like this when there is no wind to blow them into life.
Now it looks like we will have to pay for them up front whether they work or not.
“I despair,” said Gnomepak. “All of that packaging waste is going into the big holes when we could use it to power our kettles to provide heat and light and energy for all of the fairy folk.
“This would be the way to make the best use of all our latent energy in the waste stream.”