Windpower to the people (Jonathon Porritt)

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« Worse than the worst case | Main | Green issues are sidelined as the Big Party Circus rolls on »

Windpower to the people

Last week I witnessed two wonderfully windy ‘inaugurations’.

On Friday, I cycled down to the Springbank Community Resources Centre in Cheltenham to ‘turn on’ a neat little wind turbine, precisely 17.5 metres high. Not much wind to start with, but then (thankfully!) it kicked into satisfying action.

This is Cheltenham’s first wind turbine, located in the middle of a newly-regenerated urban park. The driving force behind the initiative is the Hesters Way Partnership, one of Cheltenham’s most effective community groups. It would have been completely impossible to have made any progress on this without the Partnership’s full-on support.

There were of course the usual worries about the noise the turbine would make. The flats and houses all around the park overlook the turbine, and are very much within earshot. Local Councillors got very positively involved, some ‘seeing is believing’ visits to other projects were arranged, and there was a lot of reassurance offered up over limitless cups of tea.

The result is that the community feels it’s their turbine, and are reinforced in that association by the fact that the energy bill for their Resources Centre will be £850 lower every year.

I’d encountered a rather different community operation earlier in the week – on a visit to Eurotunnel HQ just outside Calais.

Obviously a much bigger operation, with a much bigger investment in three 800kw turbines. (It should have been six, but the local planning committee objected!). Representatives of the local community were there in force, not least because of the decision by Eurotunnel to dedicate 10% of the revenues from electricity sales to an organisation called Secours Populaire France – which works with some of the most deprived communities across the country.

Eurotunnel’s got a really good environmental story to tell anyway – and has had right from its creation because of the strict conditions put upon it both by the UK and the French Government.

More details of this are available in the Eurotunnel Sustainability Report.

Interestingly, it had taken Eurotunnel almost exactly the same amount of time to move from initial idea about its wind farm to inauguration as it had taken Hesters Way Partnership! French citizens are no more enthusiastic about wind power than they would appear to be here in the UK – despite having vast stretches of not particularly distinctive landscapes with almost limitless potential for windpower – and I know how popular that statement will make me with the legions of French NIMBYs who sound and think very much like our own home-grown NIMBYs!

But there’s one simple message here: the more actively local communities are involved in new wind developments, the greater the likelihood of their success. Even if things still take a ludicrously long period of time to get delivered on the ground.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on April 28, 2010 5:35 PM | Permalink

Comments (3)

Hi Jonathon,

thanks for another interesting post. This may seem like an odd question but why do you refer to NIMBYs as NIMBIES? I have no doubt that you are aware of the acronym.

Word.
PS

Posted by punkscience | April 28, 2010 11:45 PM

Thanks for pointing that out punkscience - my fault entirely.

The moderator

Posted by JP blog moderator | April 29, 2010 9:34 AM

Hi Jonathon

I'm not sure whether I'd count as a "home grown NIMBY" or not, but I suppose NIMBYs are actually people who campaign to protect the environment in their backyard, who "think global and act local", so perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad thing.
What I do find very dangerous about the whole onshore wind debate is the way it has pitched environmentalists against conservationists, two forces that ought to be natural allies. One way or another this can only be good news for those who want to make money out of trashing the environment.
Like biofuels and most other kinds of renewable energy, wind is not an environmental free lunch. We no doubt need more wind energy, but it has sucked up an awful lot of resources which might have gone into things like tidal (and I don't mean necessarily the Severn Barrage - there are much more suitable places, like the Pentland Firth). Cynics love to see wind campaigners and conservationists at one another's throats - so much easier to force through other damaging developments.
I really don't understand why wind has been the central focus of campaigning for renewables. Micro-wind is usually a waste of time; two studies have shown it seldom even repays the turbine's embodied energy. But even major onshore installations in the windiest place - upland areas - have major potential shortcomings. It's increasingly being realised that not only are our upland peat areas a massive (albeit declining) reservoir of carbon, they also have vast potential for sequestration. A recent Natural England report looked at the damage large wind installations can do; not as bad as critics say, but still significant.
Perhaps the most objectionable aspect of upland wind farms is not the visual intrusion but that every last turbine has to have a high-standard road built right up to it, so major installations see moorland criss-crossed with roads (which will long outlive the turbines).
Well, imagine if you heard about a proposal to cover a moorland area with a dense network of roads for something you didn't like - 4x4 driving say. I think you'd rapidly become a NIMBY.
Wind energy will have an important and growing contribution to make (offshore and some onshore), but it's important to realise it's not without its drawbacks and alternative renewable technologies may be more deserving of investment.
And please, please, no more talk of NIMBYs (or even NIMBIES).
Jon

Posted by Jon Reeds | May 5, 2010 2:01 PM

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