Terence Blacker: Don’t want a wind farm near you? Well, good luck stopping it

Enthusiasm for wind farms is propelled by financial rewards, not by idealism

Burbo Bank off shore wind farm in the mouth of the River Mersey (Getty Images)

There was a time when I considered writing a book about being on the front line of a proposed wind turbine development near where I live in Norfolk. It seemed to me that there was some great material there for a factual account or, better, a novel.

Global environmental concerns (climate change, the future of the planet) would be set against more parochial ones (a church, a few fields, local lives). There would be rich satirical potential in the fact that a large landowner and a corporate developer, both looking to add to their considerable wealth, were now seriously considered as heroes of the green movement by the hippyish types who normally would have loathed them.

In the end, I decided that the local drama would quickly pass, as would the appeal of a book about it. That was in 2007; as 2014 approaches, the threat (or promise) of three giant turbines being set on unspoilt landscape between four villages lives on.

Over those seven years, there have been planning meetings, and environmental impact surveys running to thousands of pages, and appeals, and hundreds of hours of work and research, and experts, and barristers squaring up to one another expensively, and, in the end, a final, definitive decision. Yet, weirdly, it is all as undecided as it ever was.

What has happened at this nearby farm may help explain why the number of onshore developments granted planning permission has doubled in the past two years, and, why to judge by the rate of new applications, the process is likely to continue.

Press coverage of wind energy may have raised questions about its cost and efficacy. Ministers may have promised month after month that local opinion is important and that turbines should be sited the right, appropriate places. Yet on the ground, where it matters, the green rush has continued. This enthusiasm, sad to report, is not propelled by any kind of idealism, but by the unimaginably large financial rewards on offer over the next 25 years.

Our case is probably not unusual. In 2007, an energy company and a local landowner announced their plans. Two years later, well into its environmental report, the firm withdrew. The landowner approached another energy firm, TCI Renewables, which took up the challenge. When its proposal was opposed by local council planning officers and rejected unanimously by the planning committee, the developer appealed. A hearing which, in two parts, took two weeks was heard before a government planning inspector. She too rejected the case.

End of story? Far from it. Three months later, TCI Renewables announced it would be putting in a new application: same site, same number and size of turbines, but positioned slightly more closely together. While negotiating with planning officers, the developers sprung their own surprise, selecting to go straight to appeal on grounds of “non-determination”. An eight-day hearing is scheduled for the new year. So this is how it goes.

When David Cameron makes speeches about how the planning system is the victim of red tape – how it is clogged up by those who oppose development – he might consider cases like this, where the clogging is being done by big business pursuing profit and public subsidies.

I am glad I never wrote that book. It would not have been about new environmental challenges at all, but an old-fashioned story of cash and corporate bullying.

Let's heed Trudie's words

The Government’s encouragement of the rich to donate to good causes has never quite taken off. Our billionaires, it is assumed, are stingier than, say, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. An interview with the actress Trudie Styler suggests the problem is not with the seriously loaded but with the rest of us, who see any act of giving by the very rich as faintly bogus. “In the US you’re expected to be philanthropic but in England you’re considered to be a bit of hypocrite,” she was quoted as saying. The reaction to Richard Branson’s retirement to Necker has rather borne out this argument. In spite of his charitable giving, all the focus is on how the sixth-richest person in in Britain is now living tax-free. Perhaps it is time we looked on rich givers more kindly.