THE INDEPENDENT 6th October 2003
Environment
How Lakeland wind farm plan has environmentalists in a spin
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
06 October 2003
On maps, you can already see it: a circle, almost a collar, clearly beginning to take shape on the borders of Britain's largest and most visited national park, the Lake District. It is a circle of steel, consisting of wind farms, working and planned: congregations of enormous windmills set on hilltops where they can catch the wind to produce electricity, and which are visible for miles.
Some are already operating, some are under construction, others are being evaluated, a few have been turned down. But what is certain is that they represent only the first of many more to come on the Lake District borders in the Cumbrian hills, and an increasing number of local people fear they will ruin huge swaths of some of the loveliest landscape in England, and have a dire effect on the national park itself.
"We're looking at a ringing of the Lake District," said Dr Michael Hall, a member of Fells, a local landscape protection group. "These visual monstrosities are encroaching all around the borders of the national park, at an alarming rate, yet it's happening by stealth and no one has put the whole picture together, because the planning applications go in to several different district councils. "If all the ones that are planned are built, the whole area will never be free of wind farms, and its character will be totally altered."
Large areas of the hills adjoining the national park have been zoned for potential wind farm development by Cumbria County Council in its structure plan, published earlier this year (as shown in red on the left-hand map). The council is responding to pressure from the Government, which, after a belated conversion to renewable energy, is now an enthusiastic wind proponent, seeking to boost the amount of wind-generating capacity hugely in the next two decades. In a fortnight's time the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, will produce a new planning policy statement on wind farms, which it is thought will seek to make planning permission for such developments much easier to obtain. But rather than being a development opportunity, the ring around the Lake District may become a key battleground in an increasingly bitter wind-farm conflict which has been building for several years between two sets of environmentalists.
On the one hand, there are those who believe that wind power - like other renewable forms of energy which do not produce the greenhouse gases of power stations - is a vital weapon in the fight against global warming; they include most of the powerful green pressure groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the World Wide Fund for Nature. They tend to feel that nothing should stand in the way of wind power. On the other, are those who believe it must not be developed at the expense of the cherished upland landscapes where most wind is naturally available. The Campaign to Protect Rural England takes this view, as does a specifically anti-wind pressure group, Country Guardian. But as wind energy expands, opposition is increasingly coming from people with wind farms in their own line of sight. Hitherto the anti-wind protesters have been portrayed by the big green groups largely as selfish "nimbys" more concerned with their own amenities than the future of the planet. But, in Cumbria at least, their numbers are increasing, their voices are getting louder and their allies are becoming more influential.
On Wednesday last week a planning application was submitted for a wind farm of 27 turbines, each up to 375 ft high from ground to vertical blade tip, at Whinash Fell, north-east of Kendal. The edge of the moorland site, which is nearly four miles long and rises to an altitude of more than 1,500ft, creeps right up to the Lake District National Park boundary. And on Wednesday evening 150 people crammed shoulder to shoulder into a church hall in Tebay, the nearest village, to signal their opposition. The Whinash wind farm, whose potential output of more than 80 megawatts would make it one of the more powerful ones in Britain, would not only be clearly visible from the national park, but would dominate two remote and beautiful valleys just outside it, Bretherdale and Borrowdale. Furthermore, its 27 gigantic windmills, each two-thirds the height of Blackpool Tower, will intrude into one of the most beautiful views in northern England, the sweeping panorama of hills from Shap to the Howgill Fells, as seen from Orton Scar.
That much is clear from photo-montages produced by the developers, RDC, a Welsh-based subsidiary of the Italian power company Gruppo Falck, as well as by local opponents. Speaker after speaker at Tebay protested that the proposed development posed a serious threat to their landscape, to their amenity and to tourism, Cumbria's principal money earner, with minimal benefit to their community - and to the fight against climate change. Prominent among them was a man as qualified as anyone to speak on wind farms and the environment - Sir Martin Holdgate, formerly the Government's top environmental civil servant, before becoming head of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in Switzerland. Sir Martin, now retired, was chairman of the Renewable Energy Advisory Group which in 1992 advised the Government to set out on an alternative energy path. He was strongly in favour of renewable technologies, he said - but in the right place, and on the right scale. He said he was attracted to the idea of solar panels on roofs.
"The trouble with wind farms is that they have a huge spatial footprint for a piddling little bit of electricity," he said. "You would need 800 turbines to replace the output of a coal-fired power station. "
Whinash Fell and its surrounding countryside had long been recognised as of the same landscape quality as the national park itself, he said, and if the development went ahead it would be "outrageous". He called on Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, to take the scheme to a public inquiry.
Alison Hill, spokeswoman for the British Wind Energy Association, said: "Clearly we observe the boundaries of national parks, but to add further exclusion zones into the land outside them would make it very difficult for us.
"We consult very widely before we even put in a planning application."
