Yes, the world is getting hotter, and yes, Britain should produce more renewable energy. But what should be the price of that principle?
The Cambrian mountains in mid-Wales are the national park that never was. In the 1950s, when the official designations were declared, Wales was awarded Eryri (Snowdonia), the Pembrokeshire coast and the Brecon Beacons. The Cambrians were larger and grander than the Beacons, but less accessible and therefore less important. Three parks were thought enough for Wales.
That omission is about to lead to disaster. The lifting of the ban on onshore wind turbines by the energy minister, Ed Miliband, has had a swift outcome. The Cambrians’ near-500 square miles of mountain and moorland are the wildest landscape in Britain, at least south of Scotland’s Highlands. For wildness, they dwarf Dartmoor or the Peak District. Virtually devoid of habitation or roads, they stretch from the heights of Plynlimon opposite Eryri to the Pembroke border in the south. The Cambrians are the most precious of Britain’s neglected wildernesses.
Via a complicit Welsh government, Miliband looks set to hand parts of this landscape to private companies for a series of wind turbine projects. The proposals add up to more than a hundred gigantic wind turbines across the landscape. Some of the proposed machines will rise 220 to 230 metres, 50% taller than any yet seen in England and Wales, and more than double the height of Big Ben. They are true monsters.
Each turbine will require excavating an emormous pit that will be filled, says the Wild Wales Trust, with a 2,000-tonne concrete foundation. The turbine itself will consume at least 100 tonnes of steel. All this would also require an infrastructure of roads, repair facilities and storage warehouses. In addition there are proposals for more than 200km of less prominent but equally intrusive pylons to connect to the National Grid. The carbon costs of this construction will be considerable. Wind turbines have an estimated life until replacement of only 20 to 25 years.
There has been no shortage of local protest. The Wild Wales Trust has warned that the projects would “degrade and industrialise huge areas of the uplands and valleys”. It points out that a number of the sites would infringe Wales’s only Unesco biosphere in the Dyfi valley. The Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales also strongly opposes the project. Only the Welsh Greens seem hamstrung by having to regard wind power as sacred.
Another handicap is that the Cambrian mountains have few residents to speak in their defence. Last week, I saw hand-drawn notices blowing in the wind on the exquisite Glaslyn uplands, pleading for reprieve. Those great sweeping hills are apparently needed for a hilltop industrial estate of 26 turbines, each 220 metres high. They will be visible from across Wales. A nearby beauty spot is called the Artists Valley. It will be crowned by a giant rank of 37 similar turbines and will presumably have to change its name.
Were these proposals for one of Britain’s national parks they would be unthinkable. That the Cambrians have never been so designated is largely due to local farmers opposing such designation – and to the notorious immunity of Wales’s politics to its visual beauty. As it is, the turbines are not even needed to supply Welsh energy needs. The country is making progress towards renewable self-sufficiency, and is a net exporter of energy. Therefore, in effect these turbines are to supply energy for the rest of the UK. As such, the Welsh government is reprising the saga of the flooding of Welsh valleys in the 1960s to provide Liverpool with water.
Wind turbines could go anywhere the wind blows. To locate them on a glorious swathe of rural Britain to salve the pride of an ambitious politician is wrong. The damage will be obscene.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
