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Windfarm at Hyndburn
Wind turbines ­frequently inspire a special kind of wrath, especially in communities faced with them being built on their doorsteps … the windfarm at Hyndburn in Lancashire. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
Wind turbines ­frequently inspire a special kind of wrath, especially in communities faced with them being built on their doorsteps … the windfarm at Hyndburn in Lancashire. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Windfarm wars: are they a majestic man-made wonder – or a blight on the countryside?

This article is more than 8 years old

The Conservatives have promised to give people living near proposed windfarms the final say on applications. Will the future of renewable energy in the UK come down to a matter of taste?

The village of Redwick lies on the outskirts of Newport, a small, pretty run of houses whose position on the Caldicot and Wentloog Levels serves as a reminder of the force of both humans and environment: on the horizon lies the city’s docks, while a scratchpost at the ancient parish church is marked with a reminder of just how high the waters rose in the Bristol Channel flood of 1607.

A year and a half ago, the village’s skyline shifted once again, when Newport council granted permission to Renewable Energy Systems (RES) to construct a wind turbine about 1.5km north-west of Redwick – an addition to the two turbines installed in 2011 at the nearby Tesco distribution centre. The Longlands Lane wind turbine was erected on 29 November last year, and generated its first electricity within a month. It is hoped it will be capable of providing enough electricity to meet the needs of around 800 homes.

The turbine stands 100m tall, a slender, white steel pole with three graceful blades. In the quickening evening light it looks, to my eye, rather beautiful. As a city dweller I am, of course, accustomed to towering constructions, to the frequent disturbances of the skyline, to symbols of fierce modernity placed next to buildings of historical significance, and nature’s determined route around them both. I feel excited and reassured by this emblem of renewable energy before me, and from an aesthetic perspective I find wind turbines wonderful, especially en masse. The sight of a windfarm or a single turbine makes my heart lift.

But beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, and my appraisal of the Longlands Lane turbine on a warm spring evening is not likely to echo that of locals who once knew and loved the empty sky it now fills. It is also a matter of how we perceive the relationship between man and nature – whether we regard the natural world as the aesthetic norm, something pristine upon which humanity and our technological “advances” intrude.

‘There is a deeply intuitive connection between beauty, function and purpose,’ Justin Good wrote about wind turbines in 2006. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

Until now, this disagreement has mostly been abstract: if I think a windfarm is beautiful and someone else thinks it is ugly, there are few consequences. Either way, they still get built: not far away in Neath, a 76-turbine windfarm is under construction, and earlier this year the energy secretary, Ed Davey, opened England’s biggest onshore windfarm at Keadby in Lincolnshire.

But now it looks as if that might change. In the Conservatives’ manifesto, they made concrete a proposal that was floated last year: there will be no more public subsidy for onshore windfarms, and they will “change the law so that local people have the final say on windfarm applications”. There are all sorts of arguments to be made about the rationale for this, but that final clause seems to hint at the one that, finally, holds sway: people who live near them hate the way they look, and more often than not, they want them gone.

This is not a small decision. Halting the growth of onshore wind power would have various implications, both immediate and long-term – the industry provided £1.6bn of investment to the UK last year and employs 19,000 people, expected to rise to 30,000 during the next decade. Wind power is also regarded as a viable form of renewable energy in the UK; an alternative to fossil fuels, nuclear power and fracking. The UK is now the sixth-largest producer of wind power: at the start of this year its 5,958 turbines had a total installed capacity of 12 gigawatts – nearly eight of which comes from onshore turbines.

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Yet somehow the aesthetic argument holds sway. In 2006, a philosopher called Justin Good wrote an essay taking issue with such objections. Fine, the turbine might not be beautiful out of context, he said. But its usefulness made it beautiful, he went on: “There is a deeply intuitive connection between beauty, function and purpose, especially when we are thinking about the beauty of nature.”

There are more practical objections to the change, too. “Failure by the next government to harness the full potential of onshore wind and ensure new projects are built would be bad news for UK voters and bill payers,” argues Rachel Ruffle, UK development director at RES. “It would cost hundreds of millions of pounds every year on more expensive energy technologies.” Plus, she says, there are benefits for villages such as Redwick that install turbines: “Onshore windfarms bring significant investment into local communities – on top of this RES windfarms offer an annual discount off the electricity bills of the nearest properties. And with 70% of the public supporting onshore wind power, in whose interest is it to prevent well-located windfarms being built?”

Be that as it may, wind turbines frequently inspire a special kind of wrath, especially in communities faced with the prospect of seeing them built on their doorsteps.

Certainly the Longlands Lane turbine was not without its objectors. In July 2012 RES began a process of public consultation, sending newsletters to 7,852 properties, placing advertisements in the local press and holding public briefings – though it is worth noting that a public exhibition was attended by just 1% of those directly invited.

Still, concerns were voiced by environmental campaigners about the possible effects on birds and bats, residents worried about noise, the shadow flicker that occurs when the blades turn, and the visual impact on a landscape that is low-lying and largely rural.

Martyn Kellaway is the conservative councillor for the Llanwern ward, which encompasses Redwick and the area where Tesco’s turbines were built. “I opposed the turbines because I represent the communities where those turbines sat, and it tends to be the villages that bear the most impact,” he says. “They are a blight. And that’s what the people I represent feel.”

There are, he adds, more applications to build wind turbines in the area arriving all the time. “The Welsh government favours renewable energy in the form of these wind turbines,” he says. “But realistically they’ve got a lifespan of 20 years, and there’s no evidence that they’re worth it. What they ought to be doing instead is subsidising solar panels for houses, so households can benefit directly instead of this act of rural vandalism that has ruined the countryside.”

His ward, he says, is inappropriate for turbine construction. “It’s flat here,” he says, “and the impact is greater than electricity pylons – pylons are stationary, they don’t move, they’re transparent, they don’t have lights on to warn aeroplanes; you can’t see them. They’re a totally different proposition.”

Glynis Williams, a retired legal secretary and former clerk for Redwick community council agrees. “I was not happy at all when it was proposed, and I’m even less happy about it now,” she says. “I look out of my window and I can see three of them – especially at this time of year when there aren’t any leaves on the trees.” Williams refers to the towers as “monstrous” and says they have “desecrated the village, which is in a conservation area. We live on the Gwent Levels, which is completely flat, it’s a site of special scientific interest, and very beautiful, and they plonk three turbines on there.”

She describes the inescapable dominance they exert over the landscape: “You come off the motorway and as you drive along the main road, it’s in front of you on the horizon, and then because of the lie of the land, it’s suddenly on your left. It’s very strange.”

From the start, the turbine plans were not popular, she says: “I don’t think many people in the village wanted it. I know the community council wrote objections to it, because I was still clerk then.” The planners, she says “blithely ignored all local opposition”. She would rather the money were rather spent on the Severn barrage, “which would produce far more energy than wind power, not least because it would harness the huge 12-hourly tides”.

‘There runs the quick perspective of the future’ … from The Pylons by Stephen Spender, published in 1933. Photograph: Tyrone Dukes/Getty Images

It is feasible that the opinion of Williams and her neighbours may soften. This is, after all, the first year of the new turbine, and as yet they are perhaps still sizing it up. “We can see the shadow flicker, but we can’t hear it, which is great,” she concedes. “And I know when the leaves come out I won’t see it again.”

Sarah MacDonald, landlady of the Rose Inn, Redwick’s pub, is less concerned. “Personally it hasn’t impacted me at all, not remotely,” she says. “I can’t speak for anyone else, but it’s not been a topic of conversation in the pub.” There was, she recalls, more concern when the two turbines were proposed at the Tesco distribution centre. “But it’s like anything else, people get used to them. At the end of the day, it’s renewable energy, and everyone’s got to think of the future.”

When the first electricity pylons arrived on our landscape in 1928, they too were met with objection and detraction. A letter to the Times the following year raised vociferous complaint about plans to erect pylons across the Sussex Downs and was signed by figures such as John Maynard Keynes and Rudyard Kipling. But still the pylons came – from the first erected near Edinburgh to the 90,000 that now stand across the land.

Recently, the National Grid unveiled its new-style T-pylons at its training centre in Eakring, Nottinghamshire. Designed by the Danish architecture and engineering firm Bystrup, the new pylon is about a third smaller than its predecessor; it is also paler and slimmer, and shares a certain aesthetic with wind turbines. Bystrup state its intention was to “minimise visual impact and create a design that could adapt well to the English landscape”.

Inevitably, there will be those who object to the T-pylon, who will want to romanticise the traditional design as an emblem of a century that has rejoiced in access to electricity. Indeed, our relationship with the pylon says much about our relationship to the idea of electricity. In 1927, unveiling the American design for our distinctive lattice-work transmission towers – less brutal in design than those across mainland Europe and the US – the architect Reginald Blomfield hoped the name “pylons” would grant the structures a kind of mystical awe or poetic power, the word a reference to the gateways of ancient Egyptian temples said to carry the energy of the human spirit to the afterlife.

Despite the early objections, the pylon became a symbol of the thrill of energy and the future, the connection to the modern world. In the 1930s, they even gave name to a school of poetry – Cyril Connolly referred to the youthful, leftwing poets WH Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender as the “Pylon boys” for their self-conscious use of modern technology; Spender’s poem The Pylons was published in 1933: “those pillars,” he wrote, “bare like nude giant girls that have no secret”.

But after the fuss and the first flush, we have fairly ceased to notice them. As Kellaway notes, their design is largely transparent, a dance of geometry and air.

But their acceptance also says much about our relationship with nature. Our pylons, like our roads and railways, our canals and our shipyards, show our presence here; they form part of our history as much as our cathedrals and our stately homes.

And after all, nature wreaks its own havoc: shingle, shale, stagnant water, broken branches, worm casts, flooded land; those bare trees of winter expose not just a view of wind turbines but of last year’s abandoned nests.

We do not have to look hard for examples of man’s arrogance, ignorance or ineptitude, his evidence of destruction; the fossil fuels burned, the seas and lands depleted, the habitats and ecosystems disturbed. But landscape, like language, is constantly, gloriously in transition. It does not stay still. And to me, as I hope to a gathering many, the wind turbine stands as a symbol of a new and respectful intention towards the Earth. As Spender put it: “There runs the quick perspective of the future.”

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