Sunday 21^st September saw the first meeting held at The Centre At Mawsley (TCAM) to stop the Great Cransley Wind Farm.  Over 200 concerned residents from the surrounding villages were keen to learn the truth about this wind farm proposal.

The highlight of the meeting was the speaker, Mike Barnard, who is an authority on wind farm developments.  Mike was involved in successfully stopping the proposal at Boxworth in Cambridgeshire.  During that campaign, he gained an enormous amount of knowledge and expertise and has proceeded to assist with 16 other campaigns.

Mike identified many issues regarding our particular scheme and left us all in no doubt as to the likely impact on the surrounding area should the proposal go ahead.

He also spoke about the relative merits of wind energy generation.  He is not opposed to wind power.  However, he believes that the current, very large Government subsidies applied to developing wind farms enable developers to make significant profits  on unsuitable sites that do not have adequate average wind speeds and therefore will require long term subsidies

More generally, he questioned why some leading countries in wind farm technology over the last 10 years have now either reduced or  withdrawn funding from further wind farm development.

Der Spiegel, the German Newspaper, recently reported … “In Germany the dream of environmentally friendly energy has resulted in the subsidised destruction of the countryside”.

The main points he highlighted about the Great Cransley site are:

• This site has not been identified for its suitability as a wind farm but by the landowner’s willingness to make the land available.

• Inappropriate size of the site; it is too small to satisfactorily accommodate 4 turbines.

• The existence of bridleways across the site means that the location of the turbines will contravene current guidelines.

• National data deems this area to be one of low wind speed and therefore inappropriate for wind farm development.  Hence the planning application will be four turbines 100ft higher than Burton Wold, at 125m to address these shortcomings.

• An industrial development in a rural environment is an excessive degradation of the landscape.

• The proposal will have a material and diverse impact on the landscape by virtue of its height, size and prominence in relation to the significant number of residential properties.

• 4 out of 6 planning applications are rejected due to strong well co-ordinated local campaigns involving ALL of the villages surrounding a particular site.

• Developers are likely to minimise the effects on health which are now being recognised as being associated with wind farms.

• WE CAN WIN - we need to get together, we must not leave it to the few as this will reduce our chances of success.