I bloody love wind turbines! They look beautiful – modernist windmills generating future electricity for minimal cost. They are one of the greatest symbols of hope that humanity has ever created. More energy pulses around the earth in the form of wind and solar than humanity will ever need – and people have invented the means of capturing that.
I’ve consistently voted in elections for parties who will make renewable energy happen, ripping our right to clean energy out of the hands of fossil fuel shareholders. One of my requirements for moving house was to be able to see windmills from our house and I’m proud that Lancashire and West Yorkshire are already leaders in renewables across the UK, while other areas like North Yorkshire and southern counties aren’t doing their bit.
But I expect renewables to be placed with nature in mind. The biggest threat to nature is climate change, that doesn’t mean we should make the situation worse by placing renewable farms on the last remaining nature sites when there is a wealth of better sites all over the country. I didn’t vote for that kind of renewable infrastructure.
Only 8% of land in England is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), according to the Government’s Natural England department, and about 10% nationally, these are the most important last remaining fragments of the least touched natural habitat in our annihilated country. 92% of land is classified as less important, though obviously much of this IS still important to nature, so ecologists must always be involved in development. The point is, there are more than enough non-SSSI places with strong wind and sun on land to power everything in the UK. Especially alongside sea based farms.
For example, 25% of land in the UK is agricultural (crop) farmland, already changed, and by allowing these farmers to build wind turbines and solar around the crops, it supports and secures farmers, small and big. Many land owners are sitting on a gold mine. Urban areas block renewables based on protecting the ‘skyline’ this is nonsense. All cities and towns – like rural communities – should have turbines and solar.
Yesterday the owner of an SSSI on Walshaw Moor above Hebden Bridge announced plans for a completely inappropriate 41 large turbine farm on that legally protected site. It’s legally protected for good reason, it is an internationally rare and important peatland home to many endangered species. Their plans are shoddy, with barely any detail on the infrastructure, and though the company claims to have spent millions on the report – we only have their word to take for anything they claim. To break decades old legal protections on such land now would set a deeply irresponsible and scary precedent across Britain and Europe.
It seems obvious to me that the plan should be rejected outright immediately, we don’t need to build on SSSIs and should be protecting them with everything we have – nature is our largest natural carbon store, in all forms – peatland, grassland, woodland, wetland.
I’ve written to Ed Milliband a few times now, and other ministers, asking them to release a map of the UK showing where the best potential sites for solar and wind farms are. This would be a simple and obvious step. The data for this already exists, and it would spark a gold rush of land owners across the UK who can make a lot of money from adding renewables to their land, supporting their activities such as farming. But for some reason the Government hasn’t released this almost a year into office.
The problem with having this kind of discussion is that there are three types of people when it comes to renewables:
- People who don’t want any renewable technology near them: these are the NIMBYS, the Not In My Backyard people, the ones who say to only put turbines in the sea etc, if at all.
- People who want the technology now but in the right places for wildlife: the reasoned people willing to mine data (this doesn’t take long) and to work with groups to place the technology in the right places.
- People who want the technology now in any location, no matter the cost to wildlife: these are the people who either don’t care or don’t understand enough about our natural world.
I fall into group 2, I want the tech yesterday, I like having it around us – I believe every community in the country should be able to see turbines and solar panels somewhere near them. I will not align with nimbys, nimbys are the sole reason we are in the mess we are in today, they are the reason we end up with plans like this one, trying to place a massive wind farm on an SSSI when we absolutely do not need to.
I have high hopes for this Labour Government, it is fantastic to at last see a Government leading on renewables and setting up the publicly owned body GB Energy so that public finances start gaining from renewables – eventually this will bring costs down for us. I just hope they are smart about it and listen to groups like Natural England, National Trust and the Wildlife Trusts on issues like this. Specifically in regard to the Walshaw Moor proposal, to listen to the likes of Moors for the Future and the Yorkshire Peat Partnership.
Ed Milliband, Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner have been slow to reassure their voters on nature protections – even though we know from polling data that a majority of UK voters do care about nature protections, we are proud of wildlife and land. They have directed public frustration with development onto nature, which is not appropriate. Nature protections aren’t slowing progressive development down, in my experience the planning departments are. They are the teams who don’t understand processes correctly, but when ecologists and other nature experts are involved, it becomes very simple.
