24 May, 2007

Hard wind

Following the death of a farmer, which seems to have been related to confrontation over the siting of a wind farm in Norfolk, the Guardian offers a fairly long article about the siting of onshore wind farms in the UK.

For what it's worth, I'm very much pro-wind power generation (as a supplement to nuclear). I spent years working and more-or-less living within 1 km of a 10-turbine farm near Lancaster, so I'm fully aware of the noise impact (negligible unless one deliberately listens for it and unreasonably expects absolute silence) and I feel turbines generally enhance the landscape, not detract – I wouldn't welcome them in a National Park, but merely 'pretty' locations without that special status are entirely reasonable. As for preserving some fantasy of the countryside as a rural idyll: no. Just no.