Wind Farms (Mid-Wales)

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Glyn Davies]

There is truly a mid-Wales impact. The proposals affect part of Radnorshire hugely and all of Shropshire, depending on where the lines to the national grid go, and of course there is the proposal for Nant y Moch in Ceredigion, but the biggest effect by quite a distance will probably be on my constituency of Montgomeryshire. In relation to the impact locally, I pay tribute to the local newspaper, the County Times. It has understood what the people of its catchment area feel and has organised petitions. It realises that virtually everyone in the county opposes what is proposed. It is a proposition that everyone locally is deeply and fundamentally opposed to and always will be.

The protest that I spoke of will still take place, as soon as the recently elected Assembly Members have taken their seats. I will do all I can to ensure that that happens. We must ensure that in years to come, they cannot disclaim responsibility for the environmental vandalism and shocking waste of public money for which they will have been responsible. We do not want the people responsible for the decision saying, “We didn’t understand that it was going to cause that much damage.” It is important that they know now exactly what they are going to do. In decades to come, they will be remembered, in the way that those who were responsible for drowning the Tryweryn valley in the last century are remembered in Wales today, half a century later. We must ensure that, in mid-Wales, their names will be remembered in future decades as having been on the roll call of those responsible for splitting the Welsh nation asunder.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this very important debate. I have two TAN 8 areas in my constituency. Does he agree with me that the Welsh Government have got TAN 8 totally wrong? It is a crass way of drawing lines on a map and placing all industrial wind developments within those areas. If we are to have large-scale multinational wind farms in Wales, surely they should be offshore. Does he agree with me on that point?

[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.