Save Our Common Mountain Environment

When Merfyn and I stepped into the crowded protest meeting at Porthcawl’s ‘Hi-Tide’ last summer we thought ‘what are we doing here’? The place was full of people who were – err, well, rather younger than your average CPRW member! Certainly the community ill at ease with the thought of thirty turbines each 450 ft high and 3 miles out into the sunset had a strand within it of our usuals: walkers, ramblers, horseriders. But here we had the surfing fraternity who had built up this town’s economy and culture on a wave of enthusiasm.
There were two international standard golf courses, and a diverse open coastline like a coastal green belt for the monoliths of Port Talbot. The economy of the town was regenerating itself because of its seascape on the cleanest and greenest principles, yet - once again - vulnerable to the effects of the ‘pale invaders’. If we had any doubts about testing the extremes of CPRW’s policy presumption which was otherwise in favour of offshore turbines, they evaporated.

The proposal was called in by the Assembly to the first ever UK Public Inquiry into an offshore wind power station proposal. Thank goodness for the Transport and Works Act! An unlikely saviour, which gave the Assembly such a discretion rather than the alternative route via the DTI through the inflexible and myopic Electricity Act (of Cefn Croes infamy) under which no windpower proposal in the UK has yet seen public open scrutiny.

The Inquiry, spread out through the whole of November to cover an unprecedented range of issues, came at a momentous stage in the evolution of renewable energy strategy in Wales, and the United Kingdom, which has been dominated by the development of wind power on our hills. Despite a thousand turbines sprinkled over the landscapes of the UK and a disproportionately large number in Wales, they generate intermittent and unpredictably under half of one per cent of UK electricity. The threat is now spreading to lower wind speed areas courtesy of turbines over 100m which can reach higher into the skies of previously immune areas. No wonder, as you travel through rural Lincolnshire and East Anglia these days, you find huge slogans proclaiming ‘Offshore not Onshore’.

CPRW has always looked hopefully out to sea as increasingly tangible prospects for massive offshore turbine development offer an environmentally respectable alternative to our campaign to protect our landscapes. The sheer scale of offshore wind proposals throws the offensive little gnat bites on our local hills and cherished moorlands into their irritating perspective. We did not object to North Hoyle (now operating) or to Rhyl Flats which will together produce 0.6TWh (terawatt hours) out of the Assembly’s 4TWh target for 2010. The output from these two schemes alone is equal to that from all 364 machines so painfully assembled across our hills and those consented there but not yet built, including Cefn Croes. So, even without Scarweather, the recently announced 750MW ‘Round 2’ offshore wind scheme ‘Gwynt y Mor’ recessed further into Liverpool Bay would contribute 2.6TWh pa, making 3.8TWh. This nearly meets the 4TWh target already, which can now be surpassed during the next six years by the emerging viable technologies just waiting to fall out of the closet in which the over-protected onshore wind industry has shrouded them. Scarweather would certainly push that on by another 0.3TWh but in this context there is no compelling need why an unacceptable scheme should bulldoze its way into the sunset horizons of Porthcawl.

At the Inquiry we developed a Coalition with the Ramblers’ Association, the Civic Trust, the Porthcawl Town Council (who made a financial contribution to our cause) and the provocatively-named local group Regeneration How? It was a special pleasure to work in tandem with Bridgend County Borough Council before and throughout the Inquiry, for which they paid CPRW a modest fee. This renewed our partnership from the successful Wogaston and Margam * Public Inquiries with their advocate, the vivacious and at times even ferocious Tina Douglass. It is an excellent formula, hard work, but replete with good humour, and will have its next outing at the Llethercynon and Werfa Inquiries in May and June.

Nevertheless, it was a big step for CPRW to show that despite our hopes for turbines to march away into the sea, here we had that excruciating phenomenon - the right technology in the wrong place, with turbines too close to the shore, opposite a sensitive coast which faces west into the sunset. This exactly fits the exception forecast by our generally supportive Offshore Wind policy. It was understandable that we might have had one or two agnostics in our midst, but I am convinced, win or lose, it was the right decision to fight this Inquiry.
The Inspector, Mr Stuart Wild, was as usual, unfailingly courteous, attentive and helpful. At the pre-Inquiry meeting he bounded over to me and asked if we were to assemble a Coalition. Our role is really appreciated by the Planning Inspectorate. United Utilities fielded a considerable team of technical witnesses but did not provide a single member of their own staff to defend the application. Their studiously polite barrister, Mr Andrew Newcombe, looked strangely isolated and aloof behind his formidable array of files, legal reference books and document boxes. His main line of attack was to portray CPRW as a ‘one-issue’ organisation, obsessed with the visual impacts of wind turbines and not prepared to provide alternative proposals to help the Assembly reach its Target. Time will tell as to whether the Inspector feels that progress towards the Target gives us credibility in taking that position.

I had the usual prolonged exchanges with the developer’s landscape witness, Ms Kay Hawkins. My view grows stronger that the conventional approach to forecasting the visual impact of wind turbines is flawed. It has the effect of flattening the landscape, reducing the apparent size of turbines, and relegating them to a disproportionately small central sector of an expanded lateral vista across a wide A3 page. I do not say that professional witnesses cheat, but the technology does not serve reality. Inspectors like Mr Wild now anticipate this and routinely follow my suggestion to look at real turbines in real landscapes. Since the Inquiry, the Margam appeal has been dismissed by the Assembly. I sent the Inspector, Mr Alwyn Nixon, to look at the three comparable constructed turbines at Blaen Bowi (between Carmarthen and Newcastle Emlyn). He responded that “to the human eye, the turbines would appear as significantly larger objects at a given distance than viewing the photomontages in isolation would suggest”; “impressions of magnitude… should not be relied upon uncritically”. He concluded that “my assessment of the photomontage information concerning the impact of the turbines in the landscape has been significantly informed by wider assessment in the field in arriving at my overall judgement”.
(ref APP/Y6930/A/02/1103415 of 23 January 2004, paras 11.4.9-10 page 60).

I do feel that we are slow in winning these arguments. Even the ‘Targets’ issue is now being undermined by the undeniable prospects for offshore wind (though interested parties continue to deny them!). The plain fact is that Wales can exceed its targets without wrecking its landscapes and coasts and their dependent economies.

Geoffrey Sinclair
January 2004.
Reproduced by the kind consent of the author, Geoff Sinclair and the CPRW.
Geoff Sinclair is Principal of Environment Information Services and a consultant to CPRW, specifically to deal with the campaign against inappropriately sited wind turbines.