Welcoming wind farms?

Thomas Pursglove, Conservative candidate for Corby and director of campaign group Together Against Wind, is vehemently opposed to turbines

Wind farms are indeed an imposition upon communities. The fact that the membership of Together Against Wind and its campaign response rate rises daily is evidence of this. We also receive a huge number of emails each time a new campaign is launched on the site, stressing people’s anger at the most recent planning application to impose a monolithic wind turbine – or more often than not, turbines – with little regard for local opinion.

One only has to look past the Watford Gap – that well-known location often referred to sardonically by the London ‘set’ to distinguish between the north and south – to see the impact that turbines are having on our national scenery: a sea of them, semi-industrialising our beautiful countryside. Actually, I don’t think that people in cities have much of an idea of the scale of these things; many of them are nearly as tall as the London Eye...

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Maria McCaffery, chief executive of RenewableUK, Britain’s trade body for natural energy, points out that rural communities have embraced wind farms and the potential they offer

Let’s start by agreeing on one point: we all want wind farms to be sited in the right locations, with community consent. It’s how this can be best achieved that provokes impassioned discussion. If you get your news from certain fossilised sections of the press, your views are likely to be fairly hard-line. In fact, it could be said that in some parts of the media there is no debate, simply a campaign to resist change by opposing all infrastructure projects, however vital to the UK. We all welcome passionate debate, but it needs to be based on facts and not myths.

So let’s look at the facts. First, wind farms are extremely popular. Across a wide range of opinion polls, commissioned over?an extended period, positivity towards onshore wind is around 67 to 70 per cent – a comfortable two-thirds majority. What’s even more interesting is that when you break support down by region, you find that it’s highest in areas that actually have wind farms. The highest levels of support are seen in rural Scotland and the lowest levels in central London. It’s very much a case of ‘familiarity breeds content’, and this is regularly backed up by independent research. Of course, there are critics of wind farms in some rural areas, but they do not represent the majority...

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