Windfarm opponents must decide whether they want electricity or not

Objections to wind turbines, speciously citing 'democratic reasons', have a historical precedent – and they were wrong then, too
Adam Bruce
guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 November 2009 12.49 GMT
In January 1831 a Yorkshire merchant wrote to the Leeds Intelligencer to protest at the planned construction of a new railway:
On the very line of this railway, I have built a comfortable house; it enjoys a pleasing view of the country. Now judge, my friend, of my mortification, whilst I am sitting comfortably at breakfast with my family, enjoying the purity of the summer air, in moment my dwelling, once consecrated to peace and retirement, is filled with dense smoke of foetid gas; my homely, though cleanly, table covered with dirt; and the features of my wife and family almost obscured by a polluted atmosphere. Nothing is heard but the clanking iron, the blasphemous song, or the appalling curses of the directors of these infernal machines.
Remove the Victorian prose, replace railways with wind turbines and you have a typical letter from a modern windfarm to their local newspaper. The renewable energy industry is no stranger to the debate between amenity and development. Our challenge, as we build out a new energy infrastructure for the UK, is where to find the balance.
Yesterday Adrian Snook used a comment piece in the Guardian to follow in the footsteps of the opponents of 19th-century railway development and the 20th-century "hydro-isation" of highland Scotland. The "democratic reasons" that he cites in support of his arguments against wind power descend directly from those advanced by objectors to Scottish Hydro's Tummel-Garry hydro scheme in 1945, who claimed that building a dam at Pitlochry would end tourism in the Highlands forever. Today, over 400,000 people a year visit the site at Loch Faskally.
Snook may be unwilling to recognise the local economic benefits, including tourism, brought by wind and other clean energy developments, but they are real. To the many thousands who visit Scotland's existing hydro schemes, can now be added the growing number of windfarm visitors. One of the strengths of the renewables sector is its willingness to engage with the public.
Uniquely in the power sector, windfarm developers have always sought to create long-term relationships with communities through community benefit funds, and in some cases, direct local ownership of part of a windfarm. For those communities, and for the local trustees of windfarm community benefit schemes, Snook's assertions that wind energy brings no neighbourhood benefits will simply ring hollow. For people in the independent power sector, his other assertion that windfarm development is a scam perpetrated by large power companies will be even more galling.
As the UK restructures its electricity sector in the drive to meet the twin imperatives of climate change and security of energy supply, it is clear that the wind industry will become increasingly visible across the country. The electricity sector will no longer be confined to anonymous grey boxes but will be part of the landscape from Cornwall to Cape Wrath. Thousands of people will be able to point to "their" windfarm, and in many cases they will have a tangible stake in the success of that farm.
There will always be reasons for objecting to clean energy development, wherever it is located. The simple truth is that the long-term consequences of not undertaking that development will be far worse than the consequences of undertaking it. Whether it was building dams to bring clean water to 19th-century cities or to bring light to 20th-century highland homes, or as now to cut out carbon emissions from our power sector, "we are", as someone once said, "all in it together".
Or, as the chairman of the Scottish Hydro-Electric Board put it in his evidence to the Tummel-Garry inquiry:
We have come … to the point of decision. Do the people of this country want electricity or do they not? We have come to the point … where the interests of amenity and fishing have perhaps to give way to the larger issues.
• Adam Bruce is the chairman of the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA)