January 2, 2011
England, Letters, Wales

Dr Christine Hugh-Jones wants Herefordshire to wake up to realities of wind farm plans

Hereford Times, www.herefordtimes.com 2 January 2011

As the next planning committee meeting for the Reeve Hill Wind Farm approaches, your readers might like to wake up to what is in store – and all the sooner if this senseless project is allowed to open the flood gates.

In February 2008, Herefordshire planning committee members were “minded to approve” the Reeves Hill Wind Farm even though their chairman warned that they had insufficient information to make a decision.

The four proposed giant turbines would be perched on a ridge in sparsely populated northwest Herefordshire but they would be only 110 metres away from the Powys border where there are the two nearby towns of Knighton and Presteigne.

The planning department said that authority had been delegated to it to write conditions to the application and then pass it. However, no-one present at the meeting can recall this having been said in public.

The planners obviously thought better of their plan because, instead of giving permission for the wind farm, they asked the developer for more information in order to arm themselves against certain legal challenge.

This information will come to committee in the new year.

Those who thankfully observe that Reeves Hill is out in the sticks, far away from their own cherished bit of Herefordshire landscape, should also be thinking again.

Just take a look at the map in the Local Development Framework’s Herefordshire renewable energy study, appendix four part one, envisaging 174 turbines – that’s Reeves Hill times 43. Visit herefordshire.gov.uk/housing/ planning/50041.asp.

Herefordshire Council is hell-bent on foisting this discredited technology on the rest of our countryside as well.

And this just as the much-trumpeted pioneering Danes are beginning to realise what they have done to Denmark for a miniscule amount of usable energy and electricity bills though the roof.

When will the planners ever learn?

DR CHRISTINE HUGH-JONES,

Norton, Powys.

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2011/01/02/dr-christine-hugh-jones-wants-herefordshire-to-wake-up-to-realities-of-wind-farm-plans/