Where else should it go?

Tweet Last week's announcement by National Grid of the preferred location for the substation to serve wind farms in Wales brings a long-running dispute to the surface once again.  But like many Welsh political arguments, it is an argument which seems to generate more heat than light.

Many of those I saw interviewed by the BBC were refreshingly honest - they concentrated on issues such as the view from their homes and villages and the effect on property values as the basis of their opposition.  These are issues to which most of us can relate; but ultimately, electricity generation, and the infrastructure to support that, have to go somewhere, and local concerns have always to be balanced with wider needs.

We need electricity, and we need to generate it somehow.  We cannot all assume that the electricity we want and need will be generated ‘somewhere else’.  If we are going to build wind farms in Wales then the infrastructure to connect them to the grid has to go somewhere.  Not building substations is simply not an option.

That in turn brings us right back to two underlying questions.

The first is whether and to what extent onshore wind has a role in the energy mix, and the second is the subsequent question of where it should be sited. 

The second of those is the easier of the two to answer - the best location is always going to be the one where the presence and speed of wind is most consistent.  And whether we might choose it to be thus or not, Welsh uplands are ideal from that perspective.

The first question is rather harder.  It is an issue on which opinion is seriously divided, and raises a number of issues.

Some opponents of on-shore wind don't accept the need to reduce emissions, and reject the idea that anthropogenic climate change is a real phenomenon.  This is, at least, an honest position to adopt.  It may fly in the face of majority scientific opinion, but majority scientific opinion hasn't always been proved right.  If emissions are not a problem, we can simply go on using gas, oil, and even coal.

However, the consequences of rejecting the majority view if it's right are much worse than the consequences of accepting the majority view if it’s wrong.  That balancing of risks and consequences would be enough to convince me that we should act, even if I wasn't convinced that the scientific majority was right.  And once we decide to act to reduce emissions, the fact that, as of today, on-shore wind is the most proven and readily available source of renewable energy is an inescapable fact.

"The benefits will flow elsewhere", we are told.  It’s true of course.  But it's also true of many other things that happen in Wales, whether relating to energy generation or not.  It's an argument (and one I’d entirely accept) for changing the economic model under which we exploit a resource, but it's not an argument for non-exploitation as such.  I want Wales to have control over its own infrastructure, and to be able to make a decent profit from those things of which we can produce a surplus.  But I also want there to be some infrastructure and surpluses for us to bring under our own control.

“It's exploiting Welsh resources for the benefit of England."  Again, possibly true, but over-simplistic.  Exploitation doesn't recognise, or stop at, borders.  If turbines were built on some of the more suitable locations in England (whether as well as, or instead of, is irrelevant in this context), that exploitative (if it is indeed such) relationship between users of electricity and those living close to the points at which it is generated would still be the same; it would merely have become internalised within a different set of human-defined borders.  (In any event, is either the wind or the landscape really 'owned' by those who happen to live nearby, or is it more widely 'owned' by us all?)

"They wouldn't be built without the subsidies."  Again, it's true that the subsidy regime encourages renewable rather than fossil fuel electricity generation.  That's exactly what it is intended to do, in order to reduce emissions from energy generation.  But it's also true that other forms of generation are effectively "subsidised" by being able to externalise some of their costs.  Not all subsidies appear in our electricity bills, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

But perhaps the favourite counter argument is the one about "wind farms are useless".  It is an issue which I have posted on before a number of times.  If it were true, then it would indeed be something of a killer argument against both turbines and the supporting infrastructure.

It is, though, a claim which is often based on selective use of facts, some interesting ‘interpretations’ of facts, and sometimes even simplistic axiomatic assertion.  Whilst a sensible policy wouldn’t go above around 15% - 20% wind in the overall generation mix, the argument that it is completely useless doesn’t stand up to examination.

The argument about whether the sub-station should go on the proposed location will no doubt continue – but it has to go somewhere, and the best form of opposition would be to come up with a more acceptable location rather than simply oppose its construction.