October 17, 2012
Letters, Wales

Wind output not worth risk

Carmarthen Journal | 17 October 2012 | www.thisissouthwales.co.uk

Surprise, surprise. Sara Powell-Davies, the communications manager of Renewable UK Cymru, supports wind turbines.

Of course she does. That’s her job. She is paid to promote them.

No one has ever paid me a penny in 16 years of campaigning to fight against wind farms.

She claims my evidence that wind turbines will ruin Welsh tourism is anecdotal.

The evidence regarding caravan owners who claimed they would leave a South Ceredigion caravan site if one smallish wind turbine was erected on a neighbouring farm was cited by the local county councillor and quoted in a local newspaper.

Meanwhile, Ms Powell-Davies has to go back around 20 years to cite the number of visitors who visited the Delabole wind farm in Cornwall.

Since it was the first wind farm in the UK, their novelty value and the curiosity of the public were the main reasons for the visits.

It did not mean that all those visitors actually supported wind turbines!

Besides, those first wind turbines were 150ft high – the latest monsters that will carpet Wales are a stupendous 475ft high and will be clearly visible from 30 miles.

They will soon be dumped in their hundreds on the natural, pristine hill areas of Wales, unless the people of Wales resist them loud and clear.

Of course they will damage our tourism, because visitors come here for our unspoilt green scenery, not to view industrial leviathans on our hills.

There are currently 400 separate wind farm applications in Cornwall, and Cornish folk are fiercely up in arms against them.

That superb natural, rugged holiday county will be wrecked if even 10 per cent of them are approved.

Of course a small number of visitors (10,000 is very few) take a turbine tour in Swaffham, Cambridge. It is a pancake-flat landscape, with only one or two wind turbines so what else is there to look at?

And how is wind energy important, when the wind did not even blow on this exposed west coast for four days last week?

Electricity is required 100 per cent of the time, at the flick of a switch, not now and again.

L J Jenkins

Cardigan Island Coastal Farm Park

Gwbert

Cardigan


URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/10/17/wind-output-not-worth-risk/