Countryside damage not a pretty sight (From Gazette Series)

Countryside damage not a pretty sight

SIR - An article in The Independent this week exposed the damage to landscapes being allowed by the Forestry Commission, their guardian, with the development of 25 wind farm sites.

The list of windfarms demonstrated the futility of the whole exercise. The total output from the 25 Forestry Commission sites amounts to less than 1,195MW. And this only intermittently - when the wind is of sufficient but not too great a strength!

So the average output from this whole list is likely to be a puny 400MW at the very most - 16MW per site. This compares with 4,000MW output from a single coal-fired power station such as Drax, in South Yorkshire. And before the so-called green lobby jumps up to object, let me add that the six Drax boilers are designed with a low nitrous oxide and carbon monoxide combustion system and a flue gas desulphurisation plant, producing plasterboard quality gypsum as a useful bi-product.

Designs developed before the "rush to gas", with 900MW output from each boiler-turbine-generator unit would be even more efficient and with high availability. As a Cotswold warden, working voluntarily to maintain the landscape and rights of way in the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, I should be devastated to find the Cotswold escarpment disfigured in the way that the Forestry Commission appears to be allowing in the beautiful remote landscapes of Scotland and North Wales.

Because this is happening piecemeal with, as usual, no overall strategy published for public debate, Mr Blair and his (urban-centred) government are getting away with only small, local resistance.

Mr Blair says he wants to hold a "big conversation" with voters. The country marched against the illegal war, marched against the poll tax and is winning concessions at least on variable top-up fees. Perhaps it is time to demonstate against this rape of our countryside.

Graham Smith Parklands Wotton-under-Edge