Fighting to protect countryside from planners and turbines

YOUr column by Harry Cotterell (Yorkshire Post, March 24) poses several questionable beliefs. He asserts that we must put up with all the planning developers’ ideas to promote better business developments. Fancy!

We all understand the absurdity of farm buildings not being passed for developing homes for young villagers to live in, that is absolutely necessary. But what we cannot understand is the building of houses on the farmland on the outskirts of villages where there are no homeless people and there is a plentiful supply of empty houses for sale.

I have written repeatedly to Eric Pickles MP and received nice letters from his second-in-command telling me why it is not possible to make country parishes responsible for their own planning, as used to happen until fairly recently when some government decided that we needed to have Big Brother supervising our way of life.

I can’t understand why groups of villages couldn’t become units responsible for looking after our own problems which we know about far better than the urban (guerillas), no, surely not, who have the responsibility of making our lives a misery, reducing the value of our property and generally acting in a spiteful manner to no-one’s benefit.

I can remember pre-WW2 when urban sprawl was banned. How nice if it had been banned in the new planning laws and city centres were filled with pleasant housing to suit all pockets. That would certainly be suitable planning laws.

Of course, there must be some developments in the country areas to allow people with enterprise and flair to get established, but it should be amicable to the countryside and not just imposed because somebody thinks it might be a good idea and should work.

Take the plan by Bradford councillors to build thousands of houses on green-belt land from Menston to Ilkley, filling in all the farming fields alongside the River Wharfe because they reckon that Ilkley (lovely spa and holiday town, entrance to the Dales), will become a financial Mecca for future job creation!

From: Bill Dyson, East End Cottages, Woldgate, Kirkham.

BEN Stafford calls for “some light to be generated in the great turbine debate” (Yorkshire Post, March 17). It seems to me however that Mr Stafford does the opposite of that.

The facts about wind turbines and wind farms have been known for a long time.

It is an absolute fact, easily verifiable by every one of us, that sometimes there is no wind at all, notably in the coldest parts of winter and when it does blow it doesn’t blow at constant speed, it blows in gusts.

Because wind is unreliable and greatly varies, wind farms have to be slowed or backed up by conventional generators which are constantly running. The money to build these generators has already been allocated by the Government. In relation to electricity generation therefore, wind farms are redundant. They may as well not have been built in the first place.

Conventional generators can’t be turned on and off in time with the gusts of wind – their output can only be changed gradually and because they emit more carbon dioxide when they are changing output than when they are running at constant speed, wind turbines do not save on greenhouse gases.

In short, wind farms are useless. They are redundant in relation to electricity generation and they do not save on carbon emissions. They are therefore totally irrelevant in any discussion about climate change.