Why the surprise? All dynamic systems will have secondary effects. 2 million years ago CO2 levels were double what they are now and Anartictica was quite a warm place with plants growing on it, no humans around to change this climate to the current cold phase the Earth is going through, with very damaging ice ages. What cardigan covered, sandal wearing, bearded eco-zealots (and that's just the women
) fail to make a case for is that climate change is anymore that an unproven hypothesis, based on very flawed data, assumptions and calculations, which will produce results even less likely that long term weather forecasts (remember the bbq summer!).
We get all of the alarm stories about how awful global warming will be with famines etc, but how do we know it won't actually be better?
Wind farms have very limited use as they can't provide a constant base load, so as more are used, you have to have more and more power stations online to cover the fluctuations in the power generated by wind. Thereby, driving down the efficiency of gas / coal powered stations. Imagine having your car running on tick over 24 hours a day, in case you need to use it, it would be great for your fuel consumption.
The windmills also only typically produce about 30% of the power that they are rated to produce.
Not withstanding this they could have limited uses like pumping water from one part of the country to the other, or used with hydro-electric schemes, by pumping water uphill into the water reservoir for the constant generation of power.
If LibCons were serious about energy security they would instead be using the windmill subsidies to build thorium nuclear power stations, buy we know that won't happen as most of the Libs and many of the Cons wear cardigans and sandals.