Went Edge

I was out in Pontefract Town Centre this afternoon when I was approached by an earnest young man who asked me for my signature for a petition.

Earlier this year a developer who has a varied portfolio which includes quarrying and strip mining/minerals extraction put in a bid for a speculative development of six 125 metre wind turbines on what is an endangered bit of green belt between West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire. They talked about all the worthwhile outcomes to the planet, to the government, the council but had the good grace to say little about positive community impact.

The thing is that there are several thousand people within a two kilometre radius, with the communities of Carleton, Darrington, Wentbridge, East Hardwick within one kilometre and a small community of about 140 souls as close as 200 to 400 metres away, depending on measurement.

At the start of this process I believed that wind energy was green, free and limitless in potential. True on a sailing vessel a great resource, but the DTI calculated that at best in the UK apparently windiest place in Europe that existing land based wind turbines work at only 20-30% efficiency.

Renewables are hugely important but land based industrial wind farms have issues.

If we were in Scotland, the Scottish Government specify a two kilometre zone between these big industrial generators, same in France and the application would fail to meet that standard and the anguish that this one is causing would not be there.

But we are in a part of the country that Gordon Brown and before him, Tony Blair have decided can step up and make the sacrifice to enhance their green credibility. Our Constituency MP is Yvette Cooper who also happens to be Minister for Housing and Planning and she has played her part in loosening the planning system to improve the chances of success to applications like this that support the Labour government energy/media strategy.

Now there are other and significant planning issues that make this particular application flawed and I trust that existing planning legislation will take account of the 2000+ objections that have been filed.

But back to this afternoon, I wanted to hear the young man's point of view. He was clearly a champion for his position but had only been provided with a partial understanding of the application he was trying to get supporting signatures for and he had the good grace to be embarrassed as we discussed the impact on the people and communities that would suffer.

Incidentally, the governments target for renewable energy for the whole of West Yorkshire is being met by biomass co-burning at our local power station and the operator Scottish & Southern has just committed a £250M spend to generate even cleaner electricity. He was not aware of that either.

No, sorry not signing up for this particular profit opportunity.