Wind farms

I hate them. Really, really hate them. Many reasons:

• I love lonely and remote places. Wind turbines desecrate them.
• Their contribution to our energy demand is unreliable and, even on a windy day, trivial.
• They consume massive subsidies, money which could be better spent elsewhere.
• The industry is dominated by energy giants who, like 'barn-fresh eggs', portray themselves as small, cuddly and eco-friendly but are as grasping and morality-free as Big Pharma or the arms industry.
  
• They are the visible symbols of a religion, one I can't share, and religions give me the creeps.

Travelling through mid-Wales, on all roads you eventually round a corner or crest a hill, and there in front of you is a fabulous, bare and (until recently) unspoilt landscape, which fills the soul and refreshes the spirit. Except that some bastards have planted white wind turbines from horizon to horizon. It makes me want to weep.

Soon there won't be any remote places left.

Simon Jenkins puts it so well in this article. Who would have thought I would be linking to a Guardian writer in this blog? A brief taster:

The wind debate is no less dominated by a mix of politics and commerce. Turbine parks require excavating carbon sinks, concreting them and making and installing turbines and pylons, usually to distribute small, even trivial, amounts of intermittent electricity. Yet the argument is now symbolic.

Sacrificing the Lake District, the Golden Valley, the Scottish islands, even the Wiltshire vales is like Aztecs killing virgins, evidence of the machismo of power in a godly cause. This is enhanced by a rerun of town/country antagonism, with metropolitan journalists shouting nimby at their country cousins (there being no danger of a power station on Hyde Park or Clapham Common).

Good stuff. I may well return to this topic.