An English MP wants a new rule to say wind turbines can’t be built within 1.5 miles of homes. This would mean saying goodbye to new wind farms in the English countryside.
Peter Luff MP will tomorrow table a ten minute rule bill asking for an arbritrary 2km buffer zone between wind turbines and homes. This would mean a halt to new wind farms in England which is struggling to meet its renewable energy targets.
Ten minute rule bills are often used by MPs to provoke a debate and although unlikely to be successful- an arbritrary 2 km limit would bring about a collapse in the entire English onshore wind industry. This in turn would also probably cause some damage to the offshore wind energy sector as England is seen increasingly by wind turbine manufacturers (like Vestas on the Isle of Wight) as anti-wind. Attempts to kick off small or community led renewable energy projects would be much harder without the support of a healthy renewables industry.
The reason for such drastic implications is partly due to the remote areas of England being made up of our National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Currently commercial wind turbines are not allowed in these areas due to the protective nature of planning policies that apply. Without changing the rules and allowing wind farms in these areas, an unsubstantiated 1.5 mile from house rule will make it even harder or even impossible to meet our national renewable energy targets and makes a farce of our commitment to do something about climate change.
Wind farm applications should be decided on the basis of whether noise levels are quiet enough at nearby houses, in terms of decibels – not a distance limit set to wipe out onshore wind energy.
I have asked many people who live within 1km of a wind farm, from Ardrossan in Scotland to Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire whether they have any problems with regard to noise or vibration from wind turbines, and time after time – the answer is ‘no’.
Most surveys show that people feel that their local wind farm has had a generally positive impact on the area, including a survey commissioned by the Scottish Executive and carried out by Mori in 2003. This survey demonstrated that people are three times as likely to say their wind farm has had a positive impact than a negative impact.
Aeolus
November 3rd, 2009
Peter Luff is my local MP. His ill-considered parliamentary manoeuvre has effectively been dictated by a small but vociferous protest group – ‘Vale Villagers Against Scottish Power’ – who have been campaigning against plans by ScottishPower Renewables to develop a five-turbine windfarm at Lenchwick in Worcestershire.
The campaign group has consistently misrepresented the facts about modern windfarms, causing immense distress and anxiety in the local villages. Peter Luff has, I believe, misread the local situation. So aggressive have the nimbies been that the many who support the windfarm development in the area have felt obliged to keep their heads down. Thus, Luff imagines that he is representing the views of the majority of his constituents in raising the issue of the utterly unworkable, unnecessary and retrograde minimum distance rule.
What Peter Luff has failed to realise is that there is plenty of support in the local area for the windfarm, and that his gesture in parliament supports a minority of recently-arrived residents who are chiefly concerned about property investments.
Last December, Peter Luff warned that the UK would face electricity blackouts if a proper energy strategy wasn’t urgently implemented. Now he’s doing his bit to prevent onshore windfarm developments going ahead. So much for coherence and consistency!
Nick
November 4th, 2009
Totally biased once again. It very strange how you quote a survey carried out by the scotish executive where in Scotland they have such a rule. SPP6 states windfarms cant be within 2km from the edge of a village
Vicky Portwain
November 5th, 2009
Nick – your comment is misleading. SPP6 does not say wind farms cannot be within 2km of a village. Scotland follows the same guidelines as England when it comes to the distance between houses and turbines which is what this is about.
Mick Cooper
November 6th, 2009
There’s a lot of misinformation doing the rounds about wind farms. Generally this emanates from people who ‘have it all’ in the sense that they tend to live in nice places and draw their power from fossil or nuclear sources located elsewhere. Typical NIMBY’s they want this to continue. So much so that they are prepared to convince themselves, against an overwhelming body of evidence, that climate change is not happening. That scientists are deliberately misleading. You know the thing: the Earth has begun to cool, what about the Medieval warm period, etc. They cannot accept that, despite periodic fluctuations, there is a well-established warming trend which follows almost exactly the increase in fossil fuel production since the Industrial Revolution and the massive growth in the human population that industrialisation made possible. They also cannot seem to get the idea that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is an act of pollution.
Clive Burke
November 9th, 2009
Good Evening All!
I think it is more important to push for a ‘Ministry for Renewable Energy’ that has the power to allow wind farms etc. to built as long as they meet a set of standard conditions, planning for wind projects should take 12 weeks, not the 12 years(!!) it took to get the Westmill community (paid for by investors not government) wind project built -twice as long as the Sizewell B atomic power station. We know climate change is happening, but vested interests are derailing our move towards renewable energy using false pretenses in order to satisfy their own hidden agendas, for instance constantly claiming that turbines consume more energy in their construction then they ever produce, when they actually produce up to 80 times the energy they consume in their construction, including all the concrete used in the foundations. These are drastic times and we need drastic action. We’d have never have won the last war if we’d had a 12 year planning battle every time we needed to put up a barrage balloon.
Derailing the all too successful scheming, lying, NIMBY bandwagon is the first place we need to start to stop the demonizing of wind power and secure enough cheap, plentiful and limitless clean energy for the immediate future to power at least 20 percent of our needs, and maybe much more as ’smart metering’ and other technologies kick in.
Clive – Energy Security Campaigner.