tilting

I don't remember ever liking the idea of wind farms and now I've seen the turbine on Green Park, beside the motorway near Reading, several times I realise I hate the things. There it stands incongruous and arrogant, dwarfing the multi-storey glass office blocks surrounding it, turning its heavy blades indolently though deceptively fast, its tip speed over twice the national legal limit of the motorway below. Coming across it never fails to shock me and the sight of it makes me crazy and like Quixote I feel an urge to tilt at it.

Of course, these feelings were almost entirely motivated by a sense of aesthetics and scale. Out of its sight, I would concede that we would have to bite the bullet and tolerate them in the cause of reducing carbon emissions. Like it's better to cut out a diseased lung than die of cancer, if it must be done for the best then let's do it.

But then I started picking up on voices claiming wind power was a big mistake. Not purely aesthetes or nimby types like me but serious, sound-headed thinkers - reasonable people like John Etherington and James Lovelock. Worse than a mistake, the whole enterprise sounds like a government and business scam. They're being rushed through because there's easy money to be made building them and the government can claim to be green, even though in real terms and in the long run, they cost the consumer more in bills - three times more! - and make insignificant impact on reducing carbon emissions - there is even a good case to suggest they actually increase emissions when factoring in the standby conventional generation needed to compensate for wind intermittency, not to mention the concrete needed in their foundations, and the number needed to make any meaningful contribution to national energy requirements. These things are real and far worse monsters than Cervantes would have dreamed!

I still hold that however horrific a solution may appear, if it achieves overall good and prevents ultimate harm then it should be done. But the more I look into it the more it seems like being a horrible error. I don't want to see what's left of our green and pleasant land turned into dark, satanic mills purely for the benefit of careless urbanites lining their pockets with easy subsidies and governments ticking spurious quick solution boxes. So, for now, and for good reasons;

I'm against ''wind farms''!

note, the image is not Green Park but gives a sense of the inhuman scale of standard aerogenerators. I would have used an image of Green Park but found only ones which deliberately show it in a good angle, either in profile to avoid showing its full span or by selecting a view point which appears to diminish its real size in relation to its neighbouring structures. Being keen enough on photography, I've half a mind to jump in the car and do an honest job of the thing, but maybe it's something you need to see in the flesh to understand.