Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [130]
The two most interesting examples of how rancorous the debate can get are in Britain and the United States.
The British example, described by John Vidal in The Guardian, is from a remote area (well, as remote as you can get in a small island with seventy million people) on the Welsh border, near the magnificent scenery of the Snowdonia mountains. The Conway Valley in Wales is sheep-farming country, and the people who set off the uproar are hardly typical representatives of Big Corporatism. They were sheep farmers themselves, Geraint Davies and the brothers Robin and Rheinalt Williams. They have brought down on their unsuspecting heads a posse of heavyweight greeners, including the Snowdonia Society, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales, the tourism industry, various rambler societies (a curious British phenomenon dedicated to keeping as much of the countryside open to hikers as possible), the National Trust, the local Labour MP, and various members of the Welsh Assembly. More than sixty national and local groups are signing up for the fight. The wind farm they are objecting to consists of three slender turbines projecting 150 feet above a derelict stone barn. But yes, they can be seen from some of Snowdonia's peaks.
As The Guardian pointed out, few local people objected when the project began. The reasons for it seemed sound. They liked the idea of some of their own diversifying out of sheep farming, which no longer made anyone any money anyway. As Davies put it at the time, "Our copper, our slate, our young people and our water have all gone over the border. Well, our wind won't." He dismisses his critics as white settlers, a nasty dig in Britain, comparing them to the whites who settled in Rhodesia, shamelessly exploiting the black inhabitants. They were rich urbanites who had paid a lot of money for a view and just wanted to protect their investments, he declared. The opposition called wind power lunacy, asserting that it would wreck the environment it was claiming to save, and comparing it to the fatuous boast once made by a U.S. military commander in Vietnam that he'd had to destroy a village in order to save it from the enemy.25 It was NIMBYism taken to an extreme, to protect a yard most of the owners only saw on weekends.
The debate, if it can be dignified by that term, over a proposed 130-turbine wind farm in Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod was uglier still. At one point there was even an indictment, when one of the leaders of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the leading antiturbine contender, was charged with planting a fake newspaper article designed to discredit the project's builders as fraud artists. The builder was Jim Gordon, president of Cape Wind Associates, whose plan was to spend $700 million to build America's first offshore wind farm. His engineers had not picked Nantucket Sound because they wanted to irritate a lot of very wealthy people. They picked it because they needed shallow water, protection from Atlantic storms, isolation from main shipping channels, easy access to the electrical grid and, of course, wind—with an annual average of 18 miles an hour. The sound, in the federal waters of Horseshoe Shoal separating Cape Cod from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket and less than seven miles from the Kennedy family compound, was the ideal spot.
Among the heavyweight Cape Cod vacationers who opposed the project on aesthetic grounds were a former CEO of a large copper mining company, an attorney who represented Exelon Generation, one of the largest fossil-fuel-generating companies in the United States, Walter Cronkite, and Robert Kennedy Jr. "Our national treasures should be exempt from industrialization," Cronkite put it in a radio broadcast, while rather sheepishly admitting to the New York Times that yes, his own house happened to look out at that