Wind Farms (Mid-Wales)

Alun Cairns Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Glyn Davies]

It will come as no surprise to the hon. Gentleman that in principle I do agree with him on that point, but I want to touch on that area and the relationship to the National Assembly for Wales later in my speech.

The people of mid-Wales are a reasonable people. If the proposal were essential to the national interest, or if it was necessary in some way to accept the destruction of our environment for some overwhelmingly greater good, we would in all probability accept it with traditional stoicism. We would be deeply upset, of course, but we would accept the responsibility to our nation. However, that is obviously not the case; the development is all for no good purpose.

I will not go into detail about the utterly pathetic performance of the onshore wind sector in Wales, but each day we read new reports of how poorly its performance compares with what is claimed for it when new proposals are put forward. The Renewable Energy Foundation tells me that its most recent figures show that Welsh wind farms have a load factor of just 19%—the lowest ever recorded. We also know that there is a need for back-up energy generation to cover periods when the wind is not blowing, or is blowing too strongly. Little is heard about that when onshore wind developers extol the virtues of their proposals and sell their wares. The truth is that onshore wind simply does not deliver what we are told it will; it does not do what it says on the tin.

The most important industry in mid-Wales is seriously under threat because of the proposals. In my constituency alone, the local tourism alliance estimates the value of tourism at £360 million per year, and 6,300 jobs depend on it. Tourism dominates the economy, but the beautiful landscape of mid-Wales will be sacrificed on the altar of a false god. What sense can it make to erect up to 800 new turbines in mid-Wales when they will be 30 to 50 miles from any connection to the national grid? That makes no economic or climate change sense whatever; it is almost as if the plan was drawn up with no consideration of where the national grid was.

[Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate, and on the exceptional work that he has done in standing up for his community in Montgomeryshire, for mid-Wales and for communities across the border. Does he regret the fact that a centralised policy framework exists in Wales, and that even if the local planning authority rejects the application for the project, the chances of success on appeal are pretty strong, so the Welsh Assembly Government will have the final say? Does he regret the fact that the Welsh Assembly Government are not following the localism framework that exists in England, which would give local people much stronger rights to object to such applications?

[Glyn Davies]

I thank my hon. Friend for that. I will come to the role of TAN 8 and the Assembly Government in the last part of my speech, because it is key. It might seem that I am focusing overly on the position of the National Assembly for Wales, but it is crucial. Decisions will be taken in a number of places, but against the policy background of TAN 8.

The carbon impact of the development can never be compensated for by any possible carbon benefit. There is the cost of importing materials over such a large distance and over a road network that is totally unsuitable for such traffic; huge investment will be necessary just to get them to the wind farms that are to be built. There are also other environmental costs, such as the destruction of the peat bogs and much else.

In the middle of my constituency, there is a wind farm with 103 turbines, which have been there for 20 years and which are now to be taken down and replaced with new, larger turbines. However, the huge concrete pads on which the redundant turbines are built will not be removed; the turbines will be removed, but these huge lumps of concrete will stay in the ground. There will be 103 of them, together with 40-odd for the turbines that are taking the place of the old ones, and I suppose there will be another 50 when another wind farm comes along on the same site in 15 years. The destruction over a long period is almost impossible to calculate.

Even worse is the seemingly deliberate conflation of the terms “onshore wind” and “renewable energy”, which has done huge damage to public support for the latter. Most people I know are, or at least were, proud to describe themselves as being supportive of renewable energy, but the obsession with onshore wind has undermined public support for renewable energy. Occasionally—actually, this has happened only once since the scale of the proposals became known—I have heard, or rather have heard of, words of support for turbines and pylons, but those words totally dismissed all that those of us who have chosen to stay in the area greatly value. After a recent recording session for a live Welsh TV programme, a friend complained that 90% of the mid-Wales uplands would be covered in wind turbines. A representative of a local environment organisation shouted out, “What about covering the other 10% as well?” I cannot verify that conversation with precision, but the drift is clear. Such people have no absolutely idea what damage they are doing to the cause they purport to support.

There is also the opportunity cost. The massive public subsidy that onshore wind is swallowing up is just as damaging to the future of renewable energy, which will be crucial to our energy supply over the next decades. So much more could have been done to advance the wider cause of renewable energy. Biomass potentially has a great future in mid-Wales, and I could also mention microgeneration, marine power—wave and tidal power—offshore wind and solar photovoltaics, as well as several other sources of power generation that I cannot immediately recall. Indeed, there are probably several others I have never heard of. However, those possible sources of future renewable energy are not being developed because of an obsession with onshore wind. When we have turbines on the hills, politicians can point at them and say, “We did that,” but all they have done is wreak serious damage on the land that the people of mid-Wales think of as their own. Thousands of pounds have been poured into onshore wind, restricting the development of forms of renewable energy that the public would actually welcome.

In the last part of my speech, I want to look at how we reached today’s position; often, we need to look back to decide how best to move forward. I was the chairman of the local planning authority in Montgomeryshire through the 1980s, and onshore wind farms were novel at the time. However, it quickly became clear that they were hugely divisive, and most of us will have had experience of how divisive they can be, splitting communities and even families. Even at the time, I was never convinced that onshore wind was a worthwhile technology, but I could see that it was an important new technology with possibilities and that research was needed.

Several wind farms were developed in Montgomeryshire —one was the biggest in Europe when it was built—and there are many wind farms there now. Although they had a localised impact, I did not think that they were a threat to the entire region, even though some quite visionary people warned me that we were opening the door to the sort of thing that eventually happened. The Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales, of which I was the president for three years before I was elected to this place, was particularly vociferous, and it deserves congratulations on the position that it took from an early stage. Even though I was not convinced of the value of onshore wind farms at the time, my general attitude, and that of most of the population, was that mid-Wales was a large and beautiful place that could accommodate some new wind farms.

That was my attitude until 2005, and it was most people’s attitude until perhaps two months ago. One fateful day in 2005, however, the Assembly Government published a statement updating TAN 8, which offered local planning authorities guidance on how to deal with planning applications. I was horrified by what it meant, and those who discussed it over a quite a long period were equally horrified. Today, the entire population is horrified.