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Richard Winch

Onshore Wind - we have no choice

There has been a lot of coverage in the press about onshore wind with the government eventually agreeing a compromise around the planning laws.


Wind pumps and windmills have been used for land management and food production for hundreds of years. The first windmill designed to generate electricity was built in Scotland in 1887 by Professor James Blyth to power the lighting in his holiday cottage. Blyth offered the surplus electricity to the local village but was turned down as the villagers thought that electricity was ‘the work of the devil’! The first utility grid-connected wind turbine to operate in the United Kingdom was built until 1951 in the Orkney Islands and the first onshore wind farm was opened in Cornwall in 1991.Today there are more than 1,500 operational onshore wind farms across Great Britain contributing roughly 12% of the UK’s electricity needs.


However, while onshore wind has recently continued to make a big impact in Scotland, the planning laws in England have meant that there has been an effective ban on onshore wind development in England since 2015. A recent YouGov poll found that 67% of voters wanted the ban on onshore wind lifted.


The main arguments against onshore wind farms are local environmental objections. Some residents feel that they are an eyesore on the landscape. Anyone who has walked near a wind farm in windy conditions will know the turbines can be noisy for several hundred metres around the site. There are also concerns about the potential impact on birds and bats though the concrete evidence for this is still developing.


On the other hand, onshore wind is one of the cleanest and cheapest sources of energy (it's much cheaper than gas or nuclear and is roughly half the cost of offshore wind). Onshore wind turbines are environmentally efficient to install and can be constructed within a few months. It is estimated that financial payback can be within about two years. When in operation, onshore wind turbines also have low maintenance costs. The sites are usually remote and can still be farmed.


Onshore wind opens up possibilities for community ownership of wind farms and there are many success stories from around the country where the turbines are locally owned and part of the profits are reinvested in the local community. (for example see https://www.weset.org/about/)


Wind power is of course intermittent and some people question why we want to increase reliance on wind technology. Wind power in itself can not be the solution to the continuity of energy supply. We need other sources of power or other solutions like energy storage to address this problem. The role of onshore wind is to increase the overall volume of carbon free electricity, to reduce the cost of electricity and improve our energy security in relation to imported gas.


The problem we have all got with the impact of high energy costs on the public finances is that apart from reducing the amount of energy we use, there aren’t many options in the short term (i.e. next 2-3 years) to reduce the cost of energy - onshore wind is one of the few options.


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