Getting a grip on wind power
The Guardian | 5 May 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Regarding the article “Powerful case for UK to get on board with onshore windfarms”, (Business leader), before onshore wind farms are so enthusiastically encouraged by the Welsh government and others, several matters need to be addressed: having moved larger turbines from hills to the settled lowlands, developers need better advice on scale and siting, with a restraint on their urge for the largest turbines; the public need to see tighter controls set over adverse impacts and we need timely enforcement of the conditions.
Turbines are sometimes hugely out of scale and so badly sited that they leave residents with a degraded quality of life. We have found that conditions on noise levels can be sidestepped by tweaking turbines during a test period.
Since we, the public, pay for the electricity produced out of our high energy bills, and thus public funding is involved, we would like to see any increase in onshore wind accompanied by a guarantee that the size, siting and operation of schemes will be better controlled, that conditional planning consent will mean what it says and that conditions will be enforceable and enforced in a timely manner.
Mary-Rose Sinclair
Chair of the Pembrokeshire Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales
Narberth, Pembrokeshire
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2018/05/06/getting-a-grip-on-wind-power/