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Home , Criggion, Dolanog, Lake Vyrnwy, Llanerfyl, Meifod, Pontrobert

The TAN-8 project for wind turbines and pylons in : The rape of the beautiful country

1. The biggest anti-pylon and onshore wind turbine demonstrations in Europe.

2. The biggest wind project in Britain – some 2,500 onshore turbines.

3. One of the biggest wind turbine developments in Europe.

4. The biggest ever infrastructure project ever proposed in Wales (including the South Wales mining valleys in the nineteenth century).

5. Construction of around 50kms of 150-foot steel pylons in mid-Wales alone (perhaps double if north and south Wales are included): around 300 150-foot giant pylons and 240 75-foot pylons.

6. Industrialisation and environmental destruction of some of the most pristine and beautiful landscapes in Britain and the world on an unprecedented scale – 600 square miles now in mid-Wales and at least 1,400 square miles in North and South Wales to follow. This includes some of the largest wind turbines ever built – up to 600 feet high.

7. Destruction of at least three immense forests – the Dyfnant in mid-Wales; the Clocaenog in the North; and the forests around Gwernogle in the South.

8. Proposed desecration of the beautiful Vyrnwy Valley, home of saints and the Princes of from the 6 th century – akin to building pylons along the sacred Urubamba River near Macchu Picchu – yet Britain is supposed to be a developed and environmentally conscious country! Alternatively, ruination of the broad Severne Valley, with its magnificent sweep across from Powys Castle.

9. Destroying the views from three of the most famous and beautiful mountain chains in Wales – Cader Idris, the Arans and Plynlimon, also visible from Snowdon and nearby peaks 30 miles away and, later, the Beacons, Black Mountains and Clwydian range.

10. Environmental vandalism of the sources of two of Britain’s greatest rivers, the Severn and the Wye.

11. Devastation of the holiday playgrounds and main roads to the marinas of the populated West Midlands, Birmingham, Wolverhampton etc.

12. Windfalls for speculators and landowners to be taken out of the electricity bills of everyone, and in particular some of the poorest people in Britain. These proposed acts of environmental vandalism and redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich on a monumental scale are not taking place in some remote undeveloped part of the world, but in Britain, 2011-2015 – and in the name of the ‘Global Environment’!

National Grid mid-Wales and Pylon Connection Project

The National Grid plans to build 150-foot high 400KV high-voltage pylons, each some 350 feet apart through one of three corridors of exceptional national scenic beauty – along the Vyrnwy valley or one of two routes along the Severn Valley to connect up a proposed 840 wind turbines to the National Grid in .

If any of these routes – respectively of 47km, 57km or 39km long – were to be adopted it would represent an act of unprecedented desecration of unspoilt countryside in two of the most beautiful valleys in Wales, and in the as a whole, the gateways for Birmingham and the populated West Midlands across the spectacular countryside of ‘the paradise of Wales’ – , along the A495 and the A483 to the scenic west coast of Wales, used by millions of holidaymakers every year. We are writing on behalf of the communities of the unspoilt Vyrnwy Valley. The communities of the Severn Valley, which is wider and more populated and developed around the market towns of and Newtown, are just as uniformly opposed to the plans.

1. Climate change, energy and technical aspects

In opposing the proposed pylons along the Vyrnwy valley, in particular, and along the Severn Valley, we make no judgment about the need for Britain to do everything in its power to fight climate change; we are emphatically not climate change ‘deniers’ and accept that the opinion of the great majority of scientists in this regard is probably right. Nor are we equipped to make a judgment about the usefulness of wind turbines as opposed to other forms of renewable energy in contributing to that fight – although recent studies suggest that average British turbines are running at around 20-25% capacity; they therefore require backup from conventional power stations which need to be left permanently running, thus not substituting them; they do not provide much electricity in winter in intense cold, when wind is at its lowest; they must be shut down when the wind is too strong (in Wales usually in autumn). Many break down. Manufacturing the turbines itself carry a major carbon footprint (see appendix).

We note that Denmark and Germany are moving away from this kind of technology on grounds of inefficiency and cost. We observe that while a small number of large landowners and wind energy companies are benefiting enormously from the subsidies put into place to promote wind energy, the cost of the subsidies is borne by the ordinary taxpayer and to an increasing extent by electricity customers in a form of regressive taxation – pensioners in mid-winter struggling to keep warm will in effect be subsidising Scottish dukes on their grousemoors to do nothing. The concentration on wind technology seems to be crowding out other less intrusive alternative energy sources, such as undersea tidal and mini-hydroelectric projects.

We do however dispute the need to build 840 turbines in one of the loveliest and most remote upland wildernesses in the British Isles that is accessible to major population centres, notably western Montgomeryshire (which should long ago have been designated a national park), close to the sources of both the Severn and the Wye rivers, two of the greatest in Britain, in the foothills of the staggeringly beautiful Plynlimon range. These will be highly visible from the great crag of Cader Idris, after Snowdon the most famous mountain in Wales, in the Snowdonia National Park, as well as in Dyfnant Forest near , one of Wales most famous beauty spots. We do particularly object to building giant pylons and power lines from these sources disfiguring some of Britain’s finest and most poetic landscapes. Overall, the whole development will be the largest south of Scotland, covering some 600 square miles of Britain’s most beautiful, unspoilt countryside.

2. Amenity, Scenic and Environmental

Montgomeryshire as a whole is famed as the ‘paradise of Wales’ (Powys Paradwys Cymru) and for the softness of the landscape (Mwynder Maldwyn) which was sensuously moulded by glaciers in the Ice Age. The Vyrnwy valley has been celebrated throughout Welsh history as one of the holiest, most tranquil sites in Wales, and the home of Welsh kings.

The Vyrnwy valley is characterised in the west by a narrow, wooded quasi-ravine between low-lying hills, before opening out onto the wider plain of , a flat- bottomed bowl surrounded on all sides by spectacular hills, which then narrow again under Dyffryn Hill - ‘Allt-yr-Ancr’ – ‘Mount of the Hermit’, possibly named after the saint or possibly because of its bald head, like the tonsure of a monk overlooking the Vale of itself.

The vale’s originally glaciated landscape includes a number of extraordinary features: an absolutely level valley floor on which the village is sited with, on the north side, the hills of Pen-y-foel and Allt-y-Maen, which rise steeply up to above 1,000 feet, and on the south side the lower Broniarth Hill with classical ice-age moraines on its summit, rising just as steeply up from the plain. On both sides there are ancient woodlands dating back many centuries, although there are also some more modern conifer plantations.

The river at this point, after its junction with the , is itself remarkable, with its tributary streams (one under an ancient bridge by the church), meandering in classic oxbow style across the southern side of the valley, creating on its leisurely course down the flat-bottomed valley of gentle green fields and hedgerows below steep hills an almost hypnotic haven of peace, calm and tranquillity that has attracted not just poets through the ages but painters of the calibre of Paul Nash and John Wynn Harvey. These lovely hills frame not just the church but the whole village: most people that move to Meifod do so on account of the scenery alone. The landscape is small-scale, narrow and unique, not rugged, enhancing its beauty. It is a famously beautiful spot.

A mile beyond Meifod, the valley mutates into one of rolling, even smaller hills criss- crossed by a patchwork of fields and hedges, eventually flattening out by the great protrusion of Breidden Mountain, where Caractacus is said to have made his last stand and which still hosts the commemorative pillar to the eighteenth-century Admiral Rodney on its summit, to reach Shropshire and the English border. Going in the reverse direction, in the space of just a few miles, the valley transports hundreds of thousands of British visitors in search of rural beauty or the sea from the flatlands of England through a spectacular green valley and hillscape and then on to the foothills and passes of the Cambrian mountains before they reach the lovely coastal resorts of Aberdovey, Tywyn, Fairborne, Dolgellau and Barmouth. Along the valley and its surrounds, apart from Meifod, are the picturesque villages of , , , Llanfair, Careinion, Llansantfrraid-ym-Mechain, , , Four Crosses, Ardleen, , , Crew Green, etc.

In the 1960s an attempt to flood the valley for a was stopped because of its outstanding historical and landscape value. In the early 1970s, when Manchester University attempted to build a radio telescope in the Meifod Valley linked to its Jodrell Bank complex, this was turned down after evidence from the celebrated landscape architect J. St Bodfan Gryffydd about the deleterious effect that a disproportionate giant steel structure would have on the lovely, gentle, small-scale green hill landscape. The proposed procession of pylons would rise to about two thirds of the height of the hills on the southern side of the valley, and be a grotesque and continuous intrusion. The cumulative effect of these proposals would be catastrophic.

3. Historical associations

The Vyrnwy Valley stretches from west to east, from the foothills of the Cambrian mountains to England, where it is open-ended. It is one of Wales’s most famous and celebrated areas of extreme natural beauty and one of the scenic treasures of the British Isles as a whole, as well as occupying a uniquely important place in Welsh history and culture and, in addition, is host to protected species – curlews and bats.

The river flows from Lake Vyrnwy, Wales’s oldest, most spectacular and historic nineteenth-century reservoir to the lovely vales of Mathrafal and Meifod which contain the historic summer palace of the Princes of Powys, between the 9 th and the 12 th centuries. This is also one of the three most famous holy places in Wales, Meifod being to mid-Wales what St Davids (then Tyddewi) was for Dwyfor and Bangor was for Gwynedd (see ‘Celtic Earth, Celtic Heaven’ by the Rev Dr Patrick Thomas), The Great Welsh bard Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr (1155-95) wrote of ‘Meifod most fair’ as

‘A princely wooded place, an honourable churchyard A burying place of princes after the bravery of battle, The desire of poets, where many live … Blessed Meifod, no cowardly men possess it! No violence rules it, no enemies can enter it, The dwelling place of the three saints will never pay such men homage … Its fine enclosure between its lovely streams Its dignified and zealously devout inhabitants … Its lovely dawn after the depth of night …

Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr was bard to the Prince Madog ap Mareddud who, along with the other Princes of Powys, is believed to be buried in the churchyard in Meifod (incidentally one of the largest in Wales).

The church itself has its foundations in the 6 th century, when an early simple version was built by Gwyddfarch, an anchorite (hermit) monk. Two other churches were built on this ancient site, one dedicated to Saint , eldest son of the Prince of Powys, who turned from being the defender of the forces of Powys at the battle of Cogwy to renouncing his throne and becoming a monk himself, another to the Virgin Mary.

The current ancient cathedral church and tower dates back to its Norman origins in the 12 th century. Most of the main street dates back to the late 18 th and early 19 th century, but several major houses and farms, such as Pentrego, date back to the sixteenth century. The vale is a place of such Welsh cultural significance that the National Eisteddfod of Wales chose fields close to the Mathrafal Castle site for its venue in 2003. It is expected that the site will again be chosen for the Eisteddfod in 2015. Dyffryn Hill, which dominates the Meifod Valley is one of a number of ancient iron age and bronze age settlements with defensive fortifications, also possibly religious.

The historic Glyndyr Way, named after the Welsh resistance hero Owen Glyndwyr, crosses the valley, and the Ann Griffith Path, named after the greatest Welsh Methodist hymn writer is nearby. The Williams Wynn dynasty of Conservative MPs lived in the valley, as did the celebrated Quaker family the Lloyds of Dolobran, the former Liberal leader , the painter and sculptor John Wynn Harvey and the climber Charlie Meade and, today, his son, the environmentalist Simon Meade.

Obviously, in siting 150 foot industrial clutter, the question is where? – or location, location, location. It is, in short, hard to imagine a more historically sensitive valley in Wales through which to drive a column of pylons and high voltage cables – imagine doing so across Parliament Square, or past Westminster Abbey, Hyde Park, Hampstead Heath, Stonehenge, Trinity College quad in Cambridge, Dartmoor, Christ Church meadow in Oxford, or along the Cheddar Gorge or Glencoe in Scotland and you have some idea of the potential impact. In terms of river valleys, think of the upper reaches of the Thames Valley or the lower reaches of the Wye.

4. Flooding

There are acute and growing concerns about the impact of building pylons in the Vyrnwy and Severn valleys, two of the most regularly flooded in Britain. The concrete foundations would help channel the water rush into even more dangerous currents: the Meifod valley is particularly prone to flash flooding. Disrupting natural water courses in either valley would probably greatly exacerbate the already extremely serious flooding problems along the Severn in England, particularly in such places as Shrewsbury, Bewdley and Tewkesbury, already very badly affected to the extent of being cut off in some years, leading to potentially catastrophic flooding. Tampering with the already huge water flows along the Vyrnwy and upper Severn rivers is a recipe for disaster further downstream along that mighty river.

5. Safety

There are acute safety concerns regarding the siting of pylons in such a narrow valley which contains a series of substantial communities. It seems incredible, but the northernmost possible route of the pylons would run within 100 yards of Meifod village primary school. The National Grid itself accepts that the incidence of childhood leukaemia close to pylons is higher than the national rate, some 60% according to some estimates. Other illnesses have been linked to immediate proximity to pylons, including depression, breast and brain cancer, diabetes and Alzheimers. Leukaemia clusters along the routes of pylons have been found, although the evidence remains disputed. The northern route would also take the pylons immediately behind the most populated parts of the village. To the south the pylons will still be only up to 200 yards away from many village houses and new housing estates.

One of the proposed routes goes directly past the highly populated Llansantffraid-ym- Mechain and the villages of Pant and as well as Four Crosses, and another past the villages of Llandrinio, Criggion and Crew Green. The pylons would obstruct the main east-west Air Ambulance route to the high mountains, causing delays and endangering lives, as well as RAF exercises. For the National Grid to propose new pylons so close to inhabited areas is astonishing. The Grid’s own maps are outdated and show no awareness of schools, churches and historic sites, as well as the extensive new housing estates in Meifod, Llansantffraid and Four Crosses.

6. Subsidiary Pylons

In addition to the giant pylons and powerlines proposed by the National Grid, Scottish Power has proposed a sub-network of lower 75 foot 123KV pylons to carry electricity from each of the wind turbines to the main hub station at Cefn Coch or . Each of this vast web of metal structures and girders will itself be up to 10 miles in extent, further devastating the wild landscape of the Cambrian mountains, destroying the tourist industry of the area and liquidating the value of people’s homes. These ‘mini-pylons’ could amount to 150 or more. Altogether, some 600 square miles of the most beautiful upland scenery in the crowded United Kingdom will be destroyed – in the ostensible cause of protecting the environment! It is impossible to exaggerate the scale of this: the area is the size of a large English county, all of Greater London, or Dartmoor.

7. Public Opinion

On April 20 th possibly the largest protest in a century in normally placid Powys took place at the cattle market in Welshpool, attended by 2,000 people. Before that some 500 people attended an initial protest in Meifod, and around the same number attended the national grid consultation in the village. In Llanfair Careinion, and Four Crosses, hundreds have attended the consultations and protest meetings – altogether over 6,000. On May 24th, nearly 2,000 people took the day off work to travel in more than 30 buses at their own expense to Cardiff to attend the largest demonstration outside the Welsh Assembly in its short history.

The Montgomeryshire MP Glyn Davies has described the proposals as ‘an abomination’. The television personality Sian Lloyd has denounced the proposals as the ‘rape of the fair country’, Welsh television presenter and environmentalist and former Montgomeryshire Liberal MP Lord Carlisle have voiced vehement opposition, as has Myfanwy Alexander, the Welsh-speaking writer and broadcaster.

8. Wildlife and Flora

Apart from the ancient woodland, with its seasonal display of magnificent bluebell carpets under green canopies of ancient oak, the Vyrnwy valley is host to a remarkable array of wildlife and flowers: in particular, in the former category, apart from the protected curlews and bats, buzzards, hawks, woodpeckers, blackbirds, owls, cuckoos; and in the latter, daffodils, narcissi, snowdrops, campions, primroses and of course bluebells. This makes the area a haven for walkers. Birds, and in particular bats with their superb radars, will be killed in their hundreds by the high voltage electricity cables.

The impact of high voltage cables on farm animals – the abundant sheep and cattle of the area – has been increasingly documented, and the pylons will undoubtedly severely affect and obstruct farmers and their machinery.

9. Tourism

Tourism is the principal livelihood of this unspoilt and lovely area, with not just hotel, bed-and-breakfast and restaurants, but many caravan parks discreetly screened along the side of the valley. Tourism in Powys as a whole is worth some £615m a year and supports 6,300 jobs, a huge percentage of the local workforce. In the Vyrnwy valley alone, there are some 12 caravan parks, with 1,800 holiday homes earning around £27m a year, plus a further six upstream, which will inevitably be badly affected if not closed by the siting of pylons in precisely the kind of beautiful scenery holidaymakers have come to escape to. Mark Bebb, managing director of Salop Leisure, estimates the loss in income at about £490m and in jobs at about 5,000 – a huge proportion for a country area.

10. House prices

This issue in particular leads to accusations of Nimbyism. Yet it is hard to see what is wrong in people objecting to a plummeting in the values of their homes estimated at between a third and half – many have long saved-up for retirement homes – because of an arbitrary overnight decision by the National Grid. An estate agent estimates that if pylons are anywhere near a house, four fifths of potential buyers will not even look at the property.

11. Undergrounding

During the consultations, the National Grid was at pains to point out that no decision has been reached on whether the cables should go overground or underground. However, where cables have been undergrounded, notably in Yorkshire, this has only occurred under compulsion – that is, when a public inquiry has insisted that the historic/amenity/ value of an area required it. Indeed, according to the Times, the Department of Energy and Climate Change recently told Ofgem, the electricity regulator that it opposes giving the industry special financial incentives to bury them.

The Severn Valley route is shorter, and the valley is developed around Newtown and Welshpool, where it is also wider; but should this environmental atrocity proceed there a considerable portion of the Severn Valley route should by any reasonable definition of community impact/landscape/amenity/historic value be undergrounded along much of the route, while the Vyrnwy Valley and the -Worthen route should be undergrounded all the way. The National Grid has suggested that the cost of undergrounding in Powys would be multiples ‘in single figures’ of the cost of pylons, rather than the 17 or so multiple usually quoted, but of course no price can be put on the irreparable destruction of some of the most beautiful scenery in Britain.

12. Procedural and legal

The National Grid has flagrantly flouted its own rules for procedure and consultation, probably illegally, in drawing up the possible alternative routes of these pylons across largely virgin, unspoilt countryside. Under Schedule Nine of the Electricity Act 1989, paragraph I(I) the Grid ‘shall have regard to the desirability of preserving natural beauty, of conserving flora, fauna and geological or physiographical features of special interest and of protecting sites, buildings and objects of architectural, historical or archaeological interest’.

There is overwhelming evidence that this legal requirement was ignored on this occasion: Mathrafal Castle is a Scheduled Ancient Monument (SAM code MG044), as is Meifod cathedral church. The Grid appeared to be entirely ignorant that one Severn valley route runs directly in front of the National Trust’s epic Powys Castle and straight across the grounds of a Grade One listed building. Meifod village itself is a conservation area, and there are several listed buildings in the valley, including the cathedral church (grade I). Under the Holford Rules (1959) planning guidelines for the National Grid, overhead lines should ‘avoid altogether, if possible, the major areas of highest amenity value’.

The National Grid did not place copies of the proposed alternative routes in designated public libraries etc on March 8 th , as required by the Infrastructure Planning Commission, but only at the end of the month. The questions on their mid- Wales connection project consultation feedback form are largely loaded and unanswerable, requiring respondents to make a choice between the alternative substations (question one), or to express no preference – which will be taken as meaning that the respondent does not care which is chosen. They are not permitted to voice their opposition to both substations or risk having their consultation papers declared void.

Questions two and three ask respondents to identify which corridor out of nine they prefer, six in the Vyrnwy valley, two in the Severn Valley and one past Forden. Again there is no allowance for respondents to indicate they want none of these. Worse still, the routes are marked out by thick coloured lines which are so imprecise as to give very little idea of the actual path of these routes. The tactic is clearly to set neighbour against neighbour, community against community, valley against valley. But most of those affected are united in their opposition both to the wind farms and the pylons in all of such a vast and sensitive area.

The hurried and arbitrary nature of this consultation was revealed on the National Grid’s roadshow when, for example, they admitted having no idea that the Meifod valley is regularly and very seriously flooded, with trees, debris etc likely to hit pylons, that it contains old river beds which are notoriously unstable, and that further downstream, in the Four Crosses area, there are many metres thick of soft claybeds. The National Grid’s maps were out of date, marking none of the housing estates that have grown up over the past 20 years (which are discreetly sited) and no consultation at all was initially scheduled in what, thanks to development, are the largest communities in the Vyrnwy Valley, those of Llansantffraid or Four Crosses, which were only added later. The consultation is thus probably illegal and violates the Holford rules and those established by the Infrastructure Planning Commission.

13. Our Heritage

This is not a matter of ‘Nimbyism’: we are talking about destroying one of the most precious jewels of our national heritage and, for ourselves, our children and generations to come. Moreover, one that ordinary people from our great cities can enjoy for free. This point was set out eloquently by Simon Barnes in his article relating to the easing of restrictions on power lines in the Times of April 2, 2011:

‘Beauty is not a luxury: it is a basic human right. Beauty of the natural world is not a bonus, it is something that we need desperately, and seek desperately. We need it more with every passing year of progress and development and infrastructure and roads and bustling cities. That is why so many city people make a mad dash to the countryside at the weekend: that’s why we head to places stuffed with natural beauty when we take our holidays. Beauty is essential for our wellbeing. The briefest visit to a place of beauty restoreth our souls and makes us reconcile to the struggle that begins again on Monday.

We need that little moment, in a stretch of open country, that humans have not modified too obviously: undulating hills, rocky crags, precipitous cliffs, ever-shifting seas, sinister reed beds, closed-canopy woodlands, heathland that seems all sky.

We need to preserve these places not because they are nice, but because they help us to carry on. They play a vital part in the economic life of the country, because they are forever recharging the flat batteries of metropolitan humans. The idea of marching pylons across them is madness, whether you are a poet, a naturalist or an economist.’

In addition, the industrialisation of one of Britain’s finest landscapes will involve some 7,000 long distance abnormal road movements (ie escorted giant lorries) taking 10 years to complete at a rate of 3 vehicles per convoy and three convoys a day from Monday to Friday massively disrupting traffic along the two main east-west routes from the Midlands to the coast and also damaging centuries-old buildings in the Meifod, Welshpool and Newtown bottlenecks, as well as innumerable villages, buildings and bridges along the route, requiring extensive rebuilding and widening work.

Each of the 840 turbines will require an approach and departure track for the continuous pouring of concrete necessary for the 50-100 metre foundation which are likely to disrupt water tables and underground streams, and is likely to kill innumerable numbers of birds and bats in one of the best wild life sanctuaries of Britain.

Should, as is already happening in Europe, the economic case for turbines change (and the Welsh Assembly Government’s Technical Advice Note 8 which designated the areas of Wales for wind turbine development was based on data collected in 2003), both turbines and pylons will be left as mouldering industrial carcasses in once glorious landscapes – who will pay to remove them? TAN-8 is badly flawed and misleading and devotes only two paragraphs to connection with the National Grid while giving no consideration at all to the traffic impact of erecting either turbines or pylons.

Thus several hundred square miles of the British Isles’ most beautiful and unspoilt hill and upland landscapes will be blighted forever by hundreds of wind power stations (these are not ‘farms’ any more than sewage treatment centres are marinas) and pylons for minor, and possibly no, gain in terms of reducing carbon emissions; a futile industrial wasteland will remain. When Richard Llewellyn wrote How Green Was My Valley about the impact of the coal industry in South Wales, he was at least writing about an energy source that powered British industry for 150 years; he could not have imagined anyone destroying Wales’s most beautiful landscape outside Snowdonia for a power source that barely works at all. -o0o-

The principle surely remains that it cannot be right to seek to protect the global environment by sacrificing one of our most outstanding and beautiful natural environments or, to put it another way, ‘you don’t save the Environment by destroying the environment - a sinister echo of the Stalinist view that it was necessary to sacrifice the lives of many ordinary people in the wider interests of ‘the People’. Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, has declared, ‘sometimes, national need will mean we have to sit down and take a tough decision about local impact’. On reflection, he surely cannot mean that – wind turbines or pylons in Hyde Park, or Hampstead Heath, or across central London? - in relation to the most beautiful parts of our natural heritage, which act as a release and safety valve for all of us throughout these ‘sceptred’ but increasingly crowded and built-over isles.

As ordinary people who regard ourselves as trustees of these landscapes, visited by millions, for our children and generations to come, we would be immensely grateful for any support or even feedback you can give us. We must, and will, stop the march of this brutal invasion of giant steel stormtroopers from destroying 600 square miles of Britain’s most beautiful countryside.

APPENDIX

We take no position on the viability or desirability of wind energy as such: our passionate opposition to these proposals is location – the siting of hundreds of turbines in some of the most beautiful and celebrated uplands of the British Isles. But we must draw attention to the controversy surrounding onshore wind power stations. On cost, each 2MW turbine costs around £2m to build and lasts some 20 years. The electricity is sold for some £200,000 a year on the wholesale markets and receives another £300,000 of subsidy from taxpayers, which makes them immensely profitable for operators, who also pay £5,000 a year per turbine in rent to landowners, generating some £50,000 a year for an average 10 turbine ‘windfarm’ or wind power station.

There are now nearly 3,000 turbines in Britain, with plans for 10,000 more, at a cost of around £20 billion, plus anything up to £400 million to connect them to the national grid. The current turbines are costing some £1 billion a year to the ordinary taxpayer in subsidy already. The electricity regulator Ofgem estimates the additional cost in electricity bills to an average per consumer at £60 in 2008, and an average of £32.50 over the previous three years. Business bills are obviously much higher and passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices, all through cost cutting and job loss. If the full 10,000 turbines are built, the total subsidy is likely to rise to around £5 billion a year, and government policy is to shift this from the taxpayer to the consumer on their electricity bills, which seems reasonable except that many of the poorest people in society have to pay those bills which are a necessity (eg heating in winter) rather than an optional item of expenditure. The very latest estimate of the government’s own committee on climate change reveals that by 2020 consumers may be paying 30-40% of their electricity bills on subsidies at a total cost as high as £7 billion a year, with taxpayers another £2 billion.

Is this value for money? If Britain meets its targets of producing 20% of its electricity from renewables, around half of this in wind power, by 2020, it is estimated that we will contribute a net reduction of 2% in global carbon emissions – that is 1% through wind power alone. A tiny proportion – but perhaps worthwhile. Yet average yields on the turbines already in place are just below 25% of their stated capacity, which would reduce this figure to around 0.25% (of which Mid-Wales’s contribution would be less than a tenth, say around 0.02%). In the bitter cold of the 2010-2011 capacity averaged 20% due to the virtual absence of wind, with the lowest producing turbine generating just 7% of capacity (by contrast other forms of energy generation, with the exception of solar power, are predictable and produce close to full capacity).

The 3,000 or so existing turbines in Britain still produce less than a single gas-fired power station does. The turbines will need ‘backup’ gas-or coal-fired power stations to generate electricity when they do not, and because these cannot be switched on and off at short notice, they need to operate continuously (the alternative is to import energy from France and the European energy grids as indeed is reported to have happened last winter). Thus, potentially the more wind turbines are built, the more CO2 gas- and coal-fired power stations will need to be built to back them up.

Although ‘wind’ is obviously clean, free and carbon neutral, the turbines are not. Manufacturing these enormous steel structures, and the pylons that will carry their electricity, is highly carbon intensive, as is transporting them into place, the production of their immense cement foundations, the destruction of carbon-absorbing trees and the opening up of CO2 intensive peatbogs where the turbines are often situated. Coupled with the relatively small amount of energy they actually produce, the turbines may actually be more carbon-intensive than conventional fossil fuels. In Holland subsidies to renewable energy have already been sharply cut; Denmark, the pioneer of wind energy, has the highest electricity prices in Europe, rising carbon emissions, and has to import energy, leading it to abandon further construction of turbines; and Germany, another pioneer of wind turbines, is now reverting to constructing coal-fired power stations.

While a shadow has been cast over the nuclear industry by the Fukushima disaster, gas, which is half as carbon intensive as coal, is now available in much greater quantities thanks to improved drilling and transport technologies. Other forms of renewable energy, in particular wave, tidal and hydro power from our rivers (solar energy is not very productive because of our climate) have been largely neglected in the rush for wind energy which may be bringing, at enormous financial cost and in terms of environmental damage, no improvement, or even a negative effect in CO2 emissions.