CENTRE POINT
The Cabinet's appeasement of the green lobby has ruined one of Britain's natural wonders
SIMON JENKINS
Each year I take my son to Wales and ascend Cader Idris, as my father took me in my youth. This mountain is one of the natu- ral wonders of Britain. Its sweeping cwms and gullies, its deep lakes, sharp climbs and lawn-like saddles make it a sequence of challenge and delight to beat any other hike in Britain. The view from the 3,000-ft summit north is over the River Mawddach to Snowdonia. West lies the Irish Sea, south the heaving mound of Plynlimon Fawr and east the sinister peak of Aran Mawddwy. These are the lost mountains of Wales, neither north nor south. Cadet, the 'seat' of King Idris, is pride of them all.
The best drive back to England takes the old slate road through Corris to Machynl- leth and then up past the Roman mining settlement of Dylife. From here on a clear day we always stop to look back across the Dovey. There lies the complete Cader range: an unsullied panorama of British landscape from the heights above Bala round to the shores of Cardigan Bay. I have gazed on this view since childhood and even the Forestry Commission's set-square plantations failed to ruin it.
Today the view has been defaced beyond belief. In the middle of the tableau and standing guard over the upper waters of the Dovey lies a mountain ridge known as Cemmaes. Across its summit now march 24 gigantic white wind-turbines. Like crea- tures from the The War of the Worlds, they frantically wave their arms across the scenery as if semaphoring to some distant' ally. Not only is it impossible to avoid them, placed as they are on one of the most prominent spots in mid-Wales, but their ceaseless movement draws the eye from wherever else it may rest. Nobody with an ounce of respect for the countryside could have permitted their erection. (Step for- ward, David Hunt, Welsh secretary at the time.) I am not hypersensitive to landscape aes- thetics. I can see that some buildings can be set in a contrasting relationship to nature: the Ironbridge cooling towers, the Stroud Valley chimneys, even the now-demolished Fylingdales 'golf balls'. But they are in val- leys or at least respect the height and con- tour of the land round them. The Cemmaes turbines respect nothing. They are simply there to make someone money. The wind Power lobby says that they are designed to- fit into the 'contours and the shape of the landscape'. The assertion is devoid of meaning.
These towers crush the proportion of their surroundings, like skyscrapers on a mountain top. South of Cemmaes at Lland- inam is now the biggest wind farm in Europe, its towers gesticulating crazily over the hills by the upper Severn at Llanidloes. Here Scottish Power has spent £20 million, ultimately of public subsidy, industrialising some of the most deserted reaches of Welsh moorland. Another company, Man- web, wants to erect a further 50 towers 150 feet high. The paltry quantity of electricity they produce sells for twice what it cost even Arthur Scargill's coal to generate.
Wind farms are the direct descendants of the Forestry Commission's spruce planta- tions and George Brown's west London hotel towers. You start with a mildly good cause, a 'need' for more tourist beds or home-grown timber or non-fossil fuel. A minister gets publicity by squeezing money from the Treasury and throwing it at the relevant lobby. Business moves in to pocket the cash, leaning on the planners to bend conservation rules on the grounds that min- isters are in favour. The result is ugly hotels looming over west London, spruce planta- tions across Caithness, and now wind farms on the loveliest stretches of Cornwall, Yorkshire and Wales.
The public expenditure rationale is absurd. A fraction of this money, diverted to energy conservation, would save the same in carbon emissions. Wind electricity costs 9p a unit, against the fossil fuel price price of 6p. This electricity is forced on the supply companies by the Government insisting that 20 per cent of their sources must be from 'non-fossil' fuels, a restriction originally intended to make them take `I've lost my dignity, confidence, self-respect and libido.' nuclear power. Consumers pay for all this by a compulsory 10 per cent levy on fuel bills. When Peter Musgrave of National Wind Power Ltd says that 400 turbines will `meet the needs of 100,000 people — and progress towards a truly sustainable future' he is talking rubbish. Wind-power electrici- ty is only bought because the Government says so.
Wind farms are nothing to do with the harsh disciplines of the marketplace but with a Cabinet desire to appease the green lobby. Wind sower is a nationalised indus- try subcontracted to private companies benefiting from a state levy. It exists in this grotesque form to buy votes. The need would evaporate if a countervailing lobby existed and the subsidy were withdrawn. Welsh greens, led by Friends of the Earth, supported the Llandinam turbines despite their being owned by Scottish Power. The group should be renamed the Friends of Concrete, Tarmac, Aluminium and Tory Subsidy.
The thesis that visual ugliness is not a pollutant brings the conservation move- ment down to the same level of philistinism as its opponents. In a letter last year to the Times, Philip Surman of 'Energy Work- shop' claimed that national parks would suffice for the future of the landscape and derided the view that 'the rest of Britain's windy hilltops should be preserved in aspic forever'. Even if this crassly limited view of countryside planning were adequate, it is out of date. Both the Yorkshire and the Snowdonia national parks are intruded on by turbine. It may be, as now open-cast mining and nuclear stations, that there are secluded places where these structures are not visually invasive. Some might even be profitable, though I doubt it.
At present wind turbines are merely another daft agricultural subsidy. They are costly as energy and costly to the public who must pay for them and to those on whose amenity they impose. They would never be allowed into a town. There should be an organised tourist boycott of any county that permits them.
A year ago a great storm blew up from the sea and wrecked the Cemmaes turbine blades. One day economics will do the same. But by then we shall doubtless be compensating farmers for not erecting them.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times
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