Nobody in modern society can manage with merely the energy that we can provide from our own bodies. Even if we don’t appear to use much personally, there is still a vast amount of energy embodied in the hundreds of products and services which flow through our households every year. This ‘extra energy’ has to come from somewhere. In Britain, like the majority of the countries in the world, most of it comes from fossil fuels - with a dash of nuclear thrown in. In fact more than 90% of our energy in the UK comes from fossil fuels. Every time we use them, directly or indirectly, we are dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, altering its balance of gases.

The questions raised by climate change are immense. Recent studies suggest that if developing economies are allowed to grow only to the level where they will stabilise population and give a basic standard of life, then we in the developed world must achieve an 80% cut in our CO₂ footprint by 2050 in order to keep climate change within safe limits.

Fossil fuels can no longer be the major power source which drives the world - we must consider all the alternatives, and fast! Things are at last on the move, the Government has introduced a Non Fossil Fuel subsidy to kick start the renewable energy industry in the UK. A vital part of this programme is the utilisation of windpower, but, over the past few years a number of small but vocal groups have voiced their opposition to windfarms, capturing a great deal of column inches in local and national media. These appear to be their main arguments:

Many global scientists are now recommending ‘The Precautionary Principle’. In a nutshell this means that unless we know it is safe to continue to increase the rate of our fossil fuel emissions, we should minimise the risk of irreversible change and utilise all the alternatives as quickly as possible. Clearly windpower will not supply all our energy needs, but as part of an integrated renewables package it has an enormous energy production potential - Britain has the best wind resource in Europe over 33% of the total European potential! Windpower is one of the world’s fastest growing energy sources. In Europe alone the installed windpower capacity has grown by 40% over the last seven years.

The British Government has set a target to generate 10% of our electricity from renewables by 2010. This could be achieved by offshore wind alone, providing vital work for the UK’s steel and shipbuilding industries by creating 36,000 jobs. Of course this will not happen overnight; it is a difficult task and a viable offshore wind industry can only grow from a healthy and stable land-based wind industry.

Denmark, with 5.2 million inhabitants, provides 7% of its total electricity demand from the wind. It is planned to reach around 10% by 2005, and even this is only around a tenth of their available resource. The actual limits are caused by the grid distribution system which cannot, in its present form, take more than 20% of supply from ‘non firm’ sources such as wind or solar, where output varies with the changing weather patterns. But a limit of 20% still leaves us plenty of room for improvement and would make a significant impact on our emissions of greenhouse gases, and would still be only a fraction of our total practically available resource

This rather dubious argument is often used by the anti-wind lobby to make it appear that energy efficiency and renewable energy generation are two competing alternatives. This is not the case, and there is no reason to assume that it will ever be so. Again, the precautionary principle must apply - we need to explore both renewable energy and energy efficiency as quickly as possible. In fact many of the people who support windpower also practise energy efficiency, and have done for years: the two go hand in hand.

If we are to achieve the targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, we must follow both paths, and quickly. In the developed west, we are currently enjoying the benefits of a disproportionately large share of the world’s energy, yet the whole planet carries the burden of our emissions. As the global demand for electricity rises, particularly in China, Africa and the developing eastern economies, there is little doubt that this vast increase in emissions will have very serious consequences for the global eco-system. How can we be so arrogant as to demand that the newly developing economies adopt sustainable technologies, if we are not ourselves prepared to set an example in our own backyards?

This is perhaps one of the most misleading arguments: windfarms actually have very little impact on the actual environment and they certainly do not destroy it. In fact, the vast majority of our uplands are not unspolit wilderness - they are an intensively over-grazed agri-business, which is neither sustainable nor natural. A natural upland wilderness would contain a wide range of different types of trees supporting a vibrant bio-diversity of bird, insect and mammal life. The reason we are confused about what a natural upland wilderness looks like is because we destroyed it all a long time ago. But even the ‘unimproved’ heather and heathland of the 1950s was a much richer habitat than that of today’s intensive farming practices. We must stick to the facts - mono-cropping, such as intensive sheep farming or pine forest plantations, have already replaced our upland wildernesses. Conserving them in their present state is a mistake. We need to reduce the amount of sheep and conifers, and then let nature begin the repairs so that the indigenous mix of trees, birds and insects can return. Ironically, windfarming is one of the few new revenue streams which can actually help farmers re-diversify their incomes, reduce their dependence on intensive mono-cropping and begin the process of restoring upland wilderness.

This issue is often presented as a foregone conclusion when it is in fact a subjective and purely personal perspective. A great many people do not object to windfarms, they see them as a useful necessity or even as a vision of hope. The BBC survey ‘Love Them or Loathe Them’ showed that over two-thirds of the people living within two miles of the three windfarms surveyed approved of their local windfarm, and that a clear majority supported further development.

I feel sure that the objectors to windfarms wish to retain the benefits of abundant cheap energy, brought conveniently by cables, pipelines and tankers, for whom others have borne the visual and acoustic impact of mining, refining, conversion and transmission. What is important to remember with windpower is that we are paying the full price for our energy up front, as it is generated and where it is generated, rather than accumulating problems for future generations or transferring our impacts to those in other areas.

Windfarms are still a relatively recent addition to the landscape. It is a law of human behaviour that people tend to notice things when they are new. Once people have lived around them for a while, windfarms blend into the background just as all the pylons, roads, steeples, bridges, railway lines, television and mobile phone repeaters, power stations and silage towers do. The noise problems encountered in early wind developements has greatly improved through better understanding of windfarm layout and through improved blade and gearbox designs. Again, everything has a price: cars, planes, trains and factories all make some noise, why should we examine wind in isolation?

Windfarms can be up to 40% efficient, comparable with a coal-fired generator. However, this argument is misleading as the factors which really matter are cost per unit of electricity generated, overall carbon dioxide payback time and overall energy payback time. Wind turbines do well within all of these parameters. In 1991 windpower received an average contract price of 11 pence per kilowatt hour (p/kWh), and by 1994 this had fallen to 4.32 p/kWh. In February of last year it fell to 3.53 p/kWh, with some schemes being able to operate at as low as 3.11 p/kWh. So the Non Fossil Fuel levy has worked well in allowing the cost of renewable electricity to converge with the average pool price for conventional generation of around 2.5 p/kWh. It is expected that some renewable energy prices will fully converge with the pool price by the year 2000 or soon after. In fact after gas, wind is now the cheapest fuel for new generation schemes. In energy terms, at a good windy site the average wind turbine will produce in a matter of four month the amount of energy used to manufacture it in the first place. At a very poor site, this may take up to a year.

It is of course true that wind turbines need space between them to reduce wind shading, but almost all the land beneath them is still available for agricultural use - so the actual area occupied is very small and 99% of the land underneath can still be used for other purposes.

This argument was used a lot in the early days of the wind debate, and did cause much concern in many areas. The truth is that it simply has not happened. In fact visitors to areas in which windfarms have been built are so keen to stop and view them, that in many cases windfarms are now marked on vistor guides and special parking areas have had to be built!

Generating electricity from the wind creates a revenue stream, some of which goes to the landowners, the construction companies, and to the operations and maintenance team. Much of this money then circulates into the local economy. Since November 1992 around £120 million has been invested in windfarms in Wales, with approximately a quarter of this being spent within Wales. These 12 windfarms inject around £2 million per annum into the Welsh economy!

In some cases, such as the 600kW turbine adjacent to C.A.T. (see photo), a percentage of this revenue will be made available locally to support energy efficiency in the community. If the wind turbine had not been erected, then no revenue streams would be available at all. It is certainly possible to increase the amount of revenue which goes into the local economy, and C.A.T. is one of many organisations who are working hard to bring this about. The major barriers to increasing community revenue streams are as follows:

Wind energy is clean energy. No vast stretches of coastland and marine habitats are destroyed in "accidents". No legal or illegal releases of radioactivity take place, only minimal amounts of "greenhouse gases" or other emissions are released. It is also good for our balance of payments and fuel supply security, as it reduces our dependence on imported oil and gas. The environmental argument for windpower is pretty overwhelming. It also offers an honest and cost-effective contribution to a sustainable electricity grid.

Protecting the environment is now an international concern. Evidence for global climate change is becoming overwhelming and very serious. Beyond even this, fossil fuels present a range of additional threats to the environment - acid rain in particular is having a destructive effect on the European countryside.

We are faced with a clear choice between protecting the real environment or the perceived aesthetic environment. Having studied the case from both sides for a number of years, I now feel we have no option but to take responsibility and side with the real world.

The sun radiates heat to earth, and as it is very hot this radiation contains high frequencies - visible light and ‘ultra violet’ light. This high frequency light can pass right through the atmosphere, heating up the surface of the earth.

As the surface warms up it will also radiate heat. The temperature of the warmed soil is considerably less that that of the sun, so this means the radiated heat is of a lower frequency. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide act like the glass in a greenhouse, capturing the lower frequency heat re-radiated from the earth’s surface This causes heat to build up in certain areas, affecting the global climate. The greater the concentration of greenhouse gases, the greater the effect.

The only thing we know for certain about climate change is that it is unpredictable. It alters the way our weather works, making it even less reliable, causing very serious problems in many areas of the world. Climate change is very unlikely to produce nice warm weather patterns in the UK; we are in fact more likely to get an increase in changeable, wetter weather. But it could get much more serious, because if the climate changes in a way that alters the Gulf Stream, then it could get very much colder here, more like Canada than the Mediterranean!

We in the ‘developed west’ burn much more than our fair share of fossil fuels, taking the benefit here and now, but offloading the costs on to the rest of the planet and to the future generations who will have to cope with the unknown consequences of the way we are living today. Using fossil fuels is almost the perfect crime - everyone else (in the developed west) is doing it, and you can get away with almost anything! There is no getting around it - we are dicing with our future.

However, environmentalists have finally convinced scientists to look closely at the problem, with some interesting results. There are five main greenhouse gases, of which carbon dioxide is by far the most important, itself causing roughly half the greenhouse effect. The danger arises because its effects are so great from a relatively small concentration that it can be easily changed by human activities. A certain amount is absorbed by oceans, forests and peatlands, but these cannot begin to act fast enough to cope with the extra hundreds of millions of tonnes emitted each year.

Through looking at the concentrations of air trapped in samples of glacial ice, dating back over many centuries, scientists have found that the greatest change in carbon dioxide levels has occurred during the past 150 years of industrialisation. During this relatively brief period carbon dioxide levels have increased by NEARLY THIRTY PERCENT - AND THEY CONTINUE TO RISE BY ROUGHLY 3 PERCENT EACH YEAR !!

We are not only stressing the planet’s regulatory systems by releasing vast amounts of excess carbon dioxide, we are also removing these same vital systems through removing habitat and decreasing bio-diversity. The average world temperature is now rising, high glaciers are melting along with the permafrost. Research by the Scott Polar Research Institute has found that the thickness of ice at the North Pole has thinned by a third over the last decade. This also releases large quantities of trapped methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, further increasing the problem.

In general, analysts say the sea level would rise, coasts would be under threat and global harvests would become unstable. Although nothing is certain, experts are agreeing on an average of 0.2 degrees rise in global temperature per decade. This will have a genuinely devastating impact on the world’s wildlife because changes in habitat are happening much more rapidly than the rate at which the majority of species can adapt.