In 2000, renewable sources of power (of which wind is the most important) accounted for 2.8 per cent of all electricity generated in the UK. By 2024, that figure had increased eighteenfold to 50.4 per cent. This remarkable growth follows from the multiplication of wind turbines in fields or out at sea. There were just over eight hundred such turbines at the millennium. Now there are over eleven thousand. Miles of cables under the earth transmit the energy generated by their spinning blades to households and businesses. Recent governments have eagerly asserted their ambitions for Britain to become a ‘world leader’ in fields ranging from AI to genomics. With wind power, they have a case. The UK, China, the USA, Germany, Brazil, India and Spain are the top wind-energy producers. Renewables are one of the few bright spots in efforts to tackle global heating, even as total fossil fuel consumption continues to rise.

Marianna Dudley’s new book, Electric Wind: An Energy History of Modern Britain, is essential to understanding where the ambition to harness wind power came from, the disputes it has provoked and where it might be going. Today, wind power is a battleground in national politics. On one side stands the