Sirs,
If the present government ever challenges the net zero deniers on its backbenches and lifts the embargo on onshore wind farms, would Wiltshire Council allow even single turbines to be sited in the county. Conservatives among Wiltshire Councillors and MPs are on record as opposing onshore wind turbines.
I am old enough to remember the controversy when those H-shaped television aerials began to be attached to roofs and chimneys. In the village where I grew up, many people thought the aerials were an abomination that ruined the line of roofs ancient and modern. I recall a lady saying she had asked her MP to make sure such aerials were subject to planning permission. I am sure he treated her request with the seriousness it deserved. Then along came that other modern rash, individual satellite dishes for television reception. They must have infuriated this lady.
Beauty and ugliness lie in the eye of the beholder. I know people who dislike intensely those bright yellow fields of oil seed rape. They see them as blots on the traditional colour tones of the British countryside. I beg to differ.
Landscapes change all the time. I won’t go back as far as the most recent Ice Age, but there have been a multitude of changes to Wiltshire’s landscape. Deforestation spread like wild fires as farming took hold; enclosures divided land into fields; canals divided fields; wind mills introduced perpendicular structures into the landscape; ‘alien’ (see below) mettalled roads plastered great streaks of black across the countryside; railways altered many a view across the county; pylons and poles carrying electricity and telephone lines brought more strange perpendiculars; then came six-lane motorways and their house-high road signs (taking over from human-high wooden signposts). Add developments like the invention of corrugated iron, all these and many more local changes, have over the centuries altered the look of our countryside.
I happen to hate pylons. But we would have been lost without their introduction to our landscape. It is, however, a good thing members of Wiltshire’s anti-wind turbine brigade were not around when electricity began to be brought in to the county.
Wiltshire is serially Nimby when it comes to energy eyesores. The county has no coast and so no nuclear power stations. It has had no coal mines and so no slag heaps. It has no giant coal-run power stations. Yet it sits and benefits ungratefully from ‘blots’ on other people’s countryside.
The county’s hatred of wind turbines can be judged from Wiltshire Council’s April 2015 rejection of an application to build a single giant wind turbine at Thoulstone Farm near Westbury. The Council found a myriad examples of the turbine’s probable impacts with its ‘86.5 metre tip height’. It would, for instance, ’cause considerable harm to the historic setting of the Scheduled Monument known as Cley Hill and to views out from the monument which contribute to its significance.’
Furthermore the turbine’s blades provided a novel reason for the Council’s distaste, pitched in language that was hardly objective: “The introduction of a tall strident, imposing, dominant, alien form of vertical structure emphasised in its scale and presence by the movement and sweep of the rotor blades, would be at odds with the key characteristics of the landscape which sees few vertical structures.” Trees?
I doubt whether, eight years later and even having embraced the climate change emergency, the Council would alter a single word of its decision.
However, if the government finally got round to easing people’s energy bills by lifting the moratorium on onshore wind turbines – whether single ones or in ‘farms’ – there is plenty of opposition in place to prevent turbines being built in Wiltshire. Take, for example, the PLANNING GUIDELINES issued by the Wiltshire branch of the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE).
The warnings come early on their website: “…the expansion of renewable energy supply is not taken as good in itself.” The Guidelines are not dated, but presumably pre-date the recent steep rise in electricity costs and challenges to national energy security. They list ‘Social impacts’ several of which would halt any new road or building or farming development. Their ‘Social Impact’ should now include some positives such as easing the cost of living/inflation crisis and contributing to energy security. The CPRE also list ‘Landscape effects’. Among the latter issues on which developers must supply planning authorities with ‘expert independent assessment’ is this conundrum:
“…[turbines’] visual impact (even if the application is for a solo instillation), [should be] assessed both simultaneously (within one field of vision) and sequentially (as one travels through the landscape);…”
If I read the sense of that correctly, most plans for housing developments would offend the CPRE. (Talking of offensiveness, the lack of any rooftop solar panels on the Marleberg estate opposite Marlborough’s Tesco certainly offends my eye.)
The CPRE also demands a decommissioning plan must be included: “This should be such as to deliver a reversion to land and landscape conditions existing before.” Wind turbines have a life of between 20 and 25 years. If means to counter man-made climate change are not resisted and interfered with by over-zealous planners and pressure groups, over those years the surrounding landscape will have changed utterly, so reverting to previous landscape conditions will (even if feasible) stick out like a sore thumb. How quaint.
I am not suggesting Wiltshire should have giant wind turbine farms. But single turbines could bring much needed help to communities who want cheaper electricity or to a farmer who cannot now afford to pay energy costs for fruit and veg cultivation in glass houses or tunnels. Wind turbines bring economic value and gains both in their installation and long-term production of energy.
Finally, it should be noted that the odd wind turbine sited in Wiltshire will serve as everyday reminders that we have a climate change emergency and if we do not allow change we will inevitably be changed by it – and in many ways we will not like.
Yours,
Tony Millett
Clench Common
www.cprewiltshire.org.uk/what-we-care-about/renewable-energy/wind-turbines/
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