Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales<\/a>, obsessed by windfarms, says nothing about the opencast coalmines ripping south Wales\u00a0apart. Nor do you hear a word about the destruction of the ecosystems of upland Wales (and England and Scotland) by sheep grazing. These champions of the countryside want to save it from only one threat.<\/p>\nFor all that, it’s a real one. While the windfarms themselves divide communities, everyone hates the new power lines required to connect them to the grid. Here in mid-Wales, I have yet to meet anyone who will speak up in favour of them. Because they have to march across so much countryside, their visual impact is greater per pound of investment than that of any other technology.<\/p>\n
Though you could see this issue coming as clearly as the pylons themselves, the green movement is completely unprepared. Greenpeace tells me “we haven’t done any work on pylons”. Hardly anyone seems to be aware of how perilous this situation is: how easily renewable energy could be killed by the power lines issue.<\/p>\n
This is about to become a national struggle, in which opponents of the new pylons will be cast as heroes. Promising direct action, reminding us of the great battles against the reservoirs supplying England, those who marched against the new lines in Wales last week will put us, unless we act quickly, in a dangerous position. Green activists will be outflanked by green activism. The same\u00a0battle will then be fought all over the United Kingdom, wherever a new power line is planned.<\/p>\n
Many of the areas affected by proposals for new lines are either Tory constituencies or Lib Dem seats the Tories will hope to take (all of which are now contestable). It is hard to believe that the Conservative commitment to low-carbon energy could withstand a major rebellion within the party: Tory environmentalism is easily uprooted.<\/p>\n
The greens need to decide where they stand. The only position that makes sense to me is unequivocally to support the campaign against overhead lines. Where new powerlines are built they must go underground. If they can’t go underground, they shouldn’t be built. If we are not against pylons marching over stunning countryside, what are we for?<\/p>\n
But here too there’s a problem. Like the windfarms, overhead lines are favoured by the government because of its concern for cost. According to the National Grid, burying the lines connecting the turbines in mid-Wales to the rest of the system would cost 3.2 times as much as putting them on pylons (\u00a3562m vs \u00a3178m). But how much does that add to the cost of electricity?<\/p>\n
Calculating this is easy (there’s an explanation on my website) \u2013 as long as you know the capital costs of the whole project. But neither the National Grid nor anyone else I’ve spoken to is prepared to hazard a guess about the cost of the rest of the infrastructure, so I can’t yet tell you whether burying the power lines makes onshore wind here more expensive than competing technologies.<\/p>\n
In fact my efforts to obtain relevant data of all kinds from the government, the National Grid and the wind industry reveal that, like the environment movement, they are completely unprepared for this backlash. Dismayed by the collective failure to address the pylons issue, the campaign against windfarms now confidently tells the same story about this technology as others do about nuclear: the turbines are erected by big, greedy corporations; they are unfairly subsidised by the government; they will cause untold damage to human health. In view of the flack you get for supporting any power technology, I’m beginning to think it would be less controversial to argue in favour of blackouts.<\/p>\n
So this is where the United Kingdom stands. We cannot keep burning fossil fuels without cooking the biosphere. We\u00a0don’t like nuclear power. We don’t like onshore wind. We won’t like the costs of the other technologies. We reject all the means by which electricity is generated. Yet no one is volunteering to stop using it.<\/p>\n
\u2022 A fully referenced version of this article can be found on\u00a0George Monbiot’s website<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By rejecting all the means by which renewable electricity can be generated, the UK has set a very dangerous course George Monbiot guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 May 2011 21.00 BST Article history Why do those who oppose wind power insist on spoiling their case with gibberish? In his\u00a0column on Friday, Simon Jenkins claimed that onshore windfarms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.llangollenfoe.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.llangollenfoe.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.llangollenfoe.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.llangollenfoe.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.llangollenfoe.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.llangollenfoe.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268,"href":"http:\/\/www.llangollenfoe.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions\/268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.llangollenfoe.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.llangollenfoe.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.llangollenfoe.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}