February 12, 2013
Letters, Wales

Turbines are civic vandalism

12 February 2013 | South Wales Evening Post | www.thisissouthwales.co.uk

I write in response to npower Renewables’ communication manager, Sara Powell Davies’s letter (Have Your Say, Jan 29) extolling the virtues of wind turbines.

Well, as they say, she would wouldn’t she!’ She is very well paid to do so, and her very job depends upon it!

Massive Industrial Turbines (over 400ft in height!) on Mynydd y Gwair will do absolutely nothing to reduce global warming.

Government statistics 2010 state that just four/ten- thousandths of global greenhouse gases would be saved if all the turbines planned for the whole of Britain were to be implemented, and will produce an amount of electricity so small as to be totally irrelevant in terms of national energy requirements.

What is certain however, is that her company and the Duke of Beaufort, the owner of this common land, stand to receive millions of pounds annually, for 25 years, from public subsidies paid for from increased electricity bills from this scheme.

Mynydd y Gwair is an area of peace, tranquillity and unspoilt natural beauty, which in these days of stress and anxiety we just cannot afford to lose. It is the last remaining wilderness area in West Glamorgan.

Those of us who have objected to this proposed desecration are not nimbys. Rather, we have been fighting for the preservation of priceless beautiful landscapes throughout Wales and Western Britain as a whole.

We are not opposed to sustainable energy. We are just not blinkered obsessives, and know that other forms of renewable power such as Tidal Power (we have the world’s 2nd highest tidal-range right here in the Bristol channel!), Hydro-electricity, solar power, wave power, clean coal Technology, and really effective energy conservation programmes, (such as the newly announced Green Deal Scheme) are more efficient and cost-effective, and so much less damaging than these alien massive turbines, which are now destroying our once green and pleasant land.

This scheme is a most pernicious, greed-inspired and ill-thought through piece of civic vandalism.

Mike Clarke,

Co-ordinator,

Pontardawe Strollers Society

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2013/02/12/turbines-are-civic-vandalism/