Wind turbines

Wind turbines in the fen near Bourne

The battle against building wind turbines in the fens around Bourne has been waged since the first scheme was announced eight years ago but is now long forgotten because of the opposition it provoked. The £8 million project, first proposed in December 2000, came from a company called Wind Prospect which involved the erection of eleven turbines on 200 acres of agricultural land in the fen north of the town, some of them 250 feet high which is much taller than most of the surrounding church spires, but even then, it became obvious that those who lived in the neighbourhood would not endorse such a development without a fight and soon the idea passed into history.

The flat and often windswept landscape is regarded as a prime location for wind farms and there have been other similar proposals since including one in 2009 from Scottish Power Renewables which wants to erect six turbines, each 410 feet high, on farmland at Sempringham, north of Bourne, but this time the Ministry of Defence added weight to the local protest by saying that they would interfere with the radar systems at the Royal Air Force stations at Cranwell and Cottesmore which are not far away and so in September that year the application was withdrawn for the time being.

Meanwhile, the energy supplier E.ON held a public exhibition at Billingborough on Wednesday 23rd September 2009 to seek support for its own scheme to build 17 turbines on farmland east of the village while yet another project was rumoured to be in the pipeline for twelve of them on the old airfield site at Folkingham, both under fire from local residents. They do then seem a popular idea to provide electricity which ought to be welcomed, especially at a time when world supplies are at a premium and are likely to mean widespread power cuts in England by 2016 because green energy such as this is coming on stream too slowly.

Protest organisations, however, abound, such as the Action Group Against Sempringham Turbines which has been challenging local proposals since 2005. Chairman Debbie Wren, told the Stamford Mercury (18th September 2009): “I have had four years of going through dark periods of my life fighting this but as one application is withdrawn, the Billingborough project materialises. It is relentless and looks as though it will continue blighting our lives for the time being.”

There is an alternative view, that wind power is the way forward for a civilisation that has plundered fossil fuels from the earth over past centuries when energy could literally have been plucked from the skies. Supporters of this theory suggest that those people opposed to change do so without really thinking about what is involved and the NIMBY syndrome is writ large in most objections no matter how they are wrapped up in concerns over property prices, health, noise, unsightliness and pollution of the environment.

History often provides the answer to our current ills. Windmills have been with us since the very first appeared in ancient Persia almost 1,400 years ago and there were 10,000 of them in England and Wales during the early 19th century when they were particularly useful for drainage work and considerable areas were freed from water for the greater part of each year including Deeping Fen, a large tract of mainly sodden peat that runs to the very edge of Bourne. Windmills were use to counteract the effect of the lowered land surface and by 1763, over 50 were at work in this one fen alone. Many survive and are preserved as valued reminders of our heritage, notably the smock mill at Dyke village that was built by Dutch drainage engineers in the late 17th or early 18th century as a pumping mill and moved to the village around 1840 when it was converted to grind corn.

There are many others scattered around this part of Lincolnshire and the opprobrium of the preservation lobby would be heaped upon your head if you tried to dismantle or alter one of these magnificent monuments to man's achievement and so one wonders what all the fuss is about each time a wind turbine is mentioned.

How long then does a structure have to remain in our landscape before it is acknowledged as something that should be preserved as an example of the way life once was? Vast sums are being spent on preserving the Lancashire woollen mills of the 19th century, the manufactories in the Potteries, old railway lines and the tin mines in Cornwall, while anything remotely connected with water such as sluices, aqueducts and canals, is sacrosanct. If the new wind turbines that are currently causing so much concern were to materialise here in the Bourne area, they too would eventually become listed monuments. It is only a matter of time.

The electricity pylons that crisscross our countryside will eventually become defunct as power lines go underground but the prospect of dismantling these magnificent steel structures will be resisted in many areas by preservation groups who see them as examples of our island's industrial progress. One of the best examples of the changing face of conservation in recent years has occurred at Fylingdales, a remote but picturesque area of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park where in 1964, during the height of the cold war, an early warning radar station was erected at a cost of £46 million, linked with similar stations in Greenland and Alaska to give a four-minute warning of a nuclear attack.

The station consisted of a series of massive white, circular structures on the top of a hill that resembled gigantic golf balls, each nearly 150 feet in diameter, an eyesore in this place of rolling heather moorland if ever you saw one, and despite the dire state of the world on its headlong flight into Armageddon, angry voices were raised in protest at the desecration of this beautiful place. The threat from Russia has disappeared along with the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall and so the golf balls, as they became affectionately known, outlived their usefulness and were dismantled in 1992 in favour of more sophisticated but less obtrusive equipment but the outcry over their disappearance was equally vociferous as protestors insisted that they should remain as a significant part of our 20th century history.

How long then before wind turbines will find a similar place in our affections? After all, their installation does not eat up the open countryside or destroy our flora and fauna. They not only have a stately grace, are practically noiseless and move only with the wind, but are also perhaps a sign that there is hope for us in a world that has become far too dependent on the internal combustion engine and nuclear power. Would it not be better to embrace them as sentinels on the road to a new and greener technology rather than trash them like the Luddites of old simply because we are offended by the sight of their sails turning when we step outside the back door? Once their use is proven here, as it already is in many parts of the world, then in fifty years' time, perhaps even less, not a voice will be raised against them and anyone who dares suggest their removal will do so at their peril.

WRITTEN SEPTEMBER 2009

See also Solar farms