Landmark case may slow power revolution
Simon Bowers
The Observer
Guardian Unlimited Web site,
http://www.guardian.co.uk
Concern is growing that the government's hopes for a wind power revolution
to lessen
government planning objections.
In what some planning experts are calling a landmark case, Alnwick
district
council in Northumberland has rejected three 60m high wind turbines on a
site by the A697, finding that the structures would have an "adverse
impact
on an area of high landscape value". The council also said they might
present a danger to road traffic.
The decision went to a three-day appeal hearing but - in a ruling that may
have far-reaching implications for the government's renewable energy
programme - planning inspector David Cullingford upheld the council's
decision.
"The turbines would intrude against the dramatic skyline and interrupt the
silhouette of ridges and escarpments with the turning rotors of their
massive blades," he said."They would also
loom above the more intimate
landscape of the
undulations there."
Last month trade secretary Patricia Hewitt announced measures designed to
generate 10% of electricity from greenhouse gas-free means by 2010. The wind
farms planned under the scheme are expected to be offshore.
Environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth yesterday published a
league table of what it claimed were the worst polluting coal-fired power
stations in
Scottish Power; Ferrybridge in
Longannet, in Clackmannanshire,
is third.
Duncan McLaren, of Friends of the Earth
Scotland, said: "Our climate is
changing as a result of pollution. Along with other measures, greenhouse
emissions from our inefficient and dirty coal-fired power stations must be
cut.
"The government must make the worst offenders clean up or get out of the
market to make way for less damaging alternatives."
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