Stop Turbines In North Cornwall

Something that bothers me about the whole turbine “thing” is how divisive it is. We don’t like to talk about it but it is very hard for nearby groups to support one another because there is [probably] a limit to how many turbines the Government will push through in a particular area. It’s an unfortunate fact that if a windfarm say 4 miles away from one I particularly care about stopping is approved I am going to breath a very guilty sigh of relief as the chances of “mine” being approved drop dramatically.

Someone from the midlands now living in the area has emailed STINC to say the following:

I could not find a menu item on how to support a wind farm in North Cornwall in an appropriate site.  After all unless we are willing to stop using electricity it would be hypocritical to not encourage some applications.
After all the people of the Trent valley have been putting up with smoke, sulphur dioxide, increased rates of asthma, acid rain dust and noise from coal generation so that the people of Cornwall can put their lights on. 
The coal fired stations were there because the coal and water were  there.
The wind is here on top of hills so let’s decide where we will accept them and support those rather than just being a load of nimbies.

I didn’t read what he was saying properly to start with because I don’t read anything properly if I can help it and because I thought he was just calling me a nimby. But I think what he is saying is absolutely spot on. Unfortunately he doesn’t mention how to solve the difficulties of actually doing what he suggests. The obvious problem is that if I think Tredump is a good place for a windfarm because 1) it’s far enough away from my house so I won’t hear the noise from it and 2) it’s a tip and it couldn’t look any worse anyway, Joe Trevithick who’s family have lived there for 500 years is going to be quite upset if I persuade North Cornwall to vote for Tredump Community Windfarm and get it pushed through.

I think that Cornwall should pick itself up by its bootstraps and say “We are going to aim to be a net exporter of energy. We will first make a 30%(?) cut in our energy use through a self funding energy efficiency investment scheme. We will promote locally produced food. We will sort out a proper public transport system.” Once this sort of thinking is established we can start asking people to discuss and agree where we are going to site windfarms, digesters, woodpellet and biomass producers and reclaim the word community from the developers of Cheshire. When we build roads, we buy houses and land by compulsory purchase and whilst it must be devastating when it happens to you, there must be compensations. The trouble with X Community Windfarm is that there are no tangible compensations. We need to establish that within a framework for a sustainable future we don’t build windfarms in areas of outstanding natural beauty but that neither should we expect people to suffer from asthma on our behalf in Didcot. A compromise has to be reached where we agree the least worse place to build the things that ideally we don’t want at all and then go about compensating those who live near them with a certain amount of free energy, some money or some compensating improvement to their environment.

Central Governement won’t do it because they are too busy trying to refinance their other solution by selling it, or not, to the French Governement. But we are almost an island and we ought to be able to build a sustainable future with a concensus behind it. We have the Duchy. We have lots of rich people who like spending their money down here. We unfortunately also have a significant population living below the breadline who need energy efficient homes but can’t afford them and we need to deal with this too. We have a proud history of exporting industry to the rest of the world. And perhaps Cornwall’s success in leading the world in steam technology that spawned the industrial revolution leaves us with a duty to lead the world in building a sustainable future.

People more eloquent than I have written excellent documents and articles about photomontages and wind farms but it seems important that we try to demonstrate in a “Davidstow specific” way how the public and the planners are being mislead. I’m nervous of having a stab at doing this because of copyright issues and because I’m a member of the IET and I don’t like to put my name to anything I don’t think is strictly accurate in engineering terms. If you think I’m wrong about the following I hope you will find the time to put me right. The important thing as far as I’m concerned is to get to the bottom of what should reasonably be used in the public consultation about wind farms. There are hard choices to make – perhaps we are just considering whether we want to slice up a few birds in our locality and spoil the view – perhaps it’s a small price to pay for saving the planet – but perhaps we are all being conned. Many people are unpersuaded by wind farms’ ability to save the planet. The financial and carbon cost is so hard to weigh up and the Government is looking for politcial solutions not practical ones. Telling people they don’t have the right to use more than their fair share of fuel even if they are very rich is unappealing to any politician with any chance of being elected.

My question is: “Why don’t the planners force the developers to follow the guidelines and produce single frame photomontages of proposed developments?”

Because I don’t have access to photomontages submitted to the planners, I’ve taken a screen dump of a leaflet available at http://www.davidstowcommunitywindfarm.co.uk/images/flyer.pdf which shows one of the panoramic photomontages that the developers love. It makes the turbines look tiny and insignificant. Colin Caudery has described the problems with these representations at some length in an article at http://www.stinc.co.uk/newsID031.shtml and the original “best practice” guidance is available at Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) Guidance document. Here’s the screen dump (click it to view it full screen):

Screen dump of leaflet

I suggest that the turbines are all but invisible. If you take chunks of the panorama and enlarge it so that it is “something like” you might see if you were on Showery Tor it might look something like this:

A chunk of the panorma as you might see it on site

This is pretty unscientific. But what can you do when you have no resources to try and piece the evidence together properly? I’m not a photo analyst and as a group STINC doesn’t have the money to employ one. It gives you an idea of what we’re looking for though – we want to understand how it will look to a person who is actually going for a walk. If you were sitting on Showery Tor and looking towards Davidstow Woods you could have this picture on a sheet of A4 and hold it up and compare it with the view. When you’d recovered from the shock of how it would look you might manage to make your way home again.

It doesn’t look too bad though. That is until you realise that you can’t actually see the blades of the turbines at all. And it’s the moving blades that are very disturbing because it is not a natural site to see 90m diameter “things” moving in the landscape. And certainly not 20 of them in a space that used to be pleasant moorland.

So I’ve highlighted them by putting in a narrow rectangle of white approximately over the turbines so you can see them. If you drive back towards Camelford from an evening walk on the beach at Trebarwith you come to a T-junction where you get a “splendid” view of the Deli turbines and when the sun hits them as it is low in the sky they absolutely gleam and on this basis I think I am justified in putting the turbines in in PBW. Maybe you think otherwise? I have sized the column on the original taking the top of what is visible to be the hub of the turbine. I’ve then naively added 3 lines at 120Degree intervals measuring the lines to be a little over half the height of the hub (45m radius vs 80m to the hub).

Simplistic addition of blades and highlighting of the tower.

The turbines further to the east are more jumbled in and my simplistic approach is clearly inadequate to provide anything realist so I’ve just put in a few to give an impression.

Easterly view - just a few turbines highlighted.

The heights are entirely judged on the original photomontage. If they are under or over sized then my simplistic representations will be too.

So much fuss but you need a panorama to see the whole development at once don’t you? Absolutely not! The recommendation is to use a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera and this has an angle of view of 39Degrees as is explained in the references above. If you draw two lines at an angle of 39Degrees on a map you can just get the whole development into a single frame view from a viewing point on Roughtor (rather than Showery Tor) that could be posted on the planning website and the developer’s website and be printed by anyone with a normal A4 colour printer so that they could take a walk up Roughtor to get an idea of how the development would look.

A 39Degree triangle drawn from the top of Roughtor

Remember you can see the pictures full screen by clicking on them.

If you think what I’m saying is wrong please get in touch using the comments link at the end of the article or email me at webmaster@stinc.co.uk

I think decisions should be made on the basis of fact, not spin. Just to be clear I’m not asking for anything other than for the developers and planners to follow the SNH Guidance. At the least the developers should provide an additional set of A4 single frame images using the equivalent of a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera. If the developers are certain that the community (they like that word) are in favour of the turbines even though they are so astonishingly vast and will mince the birds they won’t mind following the guidelines and publishing some representative photomontages will they?

Tim Henderson

Source of extended map in the last picture was Google Maps, reproduced without permission. Maps aligned and scales matched on the cross of the runway and the woods by Roughtor car park.