Opposition towards E.ON’s proposals for the Isles, a wind farm of up to 45 turbines east of Newton Aycliffe, in County Durham, has been strong. But as part of a series of articles on the the plans, Adam Bell, from industry trade body RenewableUK, argues in favour of the scheme which could generate 115MW of electricity a year.

WE need to keep the lights on.

Over the next decade, a quarter of our older power stations are going offline. Our old nuclear plants are being retired, and coal plants are being shut down as a result of European air pollution legislation.

To stop the lights going out, those sources of energy need to be replaced, and soon.

Our choices in doing so are fairly limited.

We need to deploy a significant amount of generation in a relatively short space of time.

While new nuclear plants may yet play a part in our future energy mix, the sheer length of time it takes to build a new one – at least seven years – means that new nuclear cannot help us bridge the coming energy gap.

New coal power stations are actually one of the costlier technologies now, and have very little political support. Advanced renewables, like wave power and tidal power, are still at a very early stage of their development and are not likely to contribute significant amounts of generation before 2020.

The choice is, therefore, relatively straightforward.

We can choose between building new gaspowered generation by itself, or building a combination of gas and wind power.

Gas plants are relatively cheap and quick to construct, but have high running costs. Recent electricity price rises have been driven in large part by increases in the wholesale gas price.

Given that more than half of our current electricity generation plant is gas-powered, increasing the demand for gas in our generation sector would force prices up even further.

The Government regulator Ofgem has predicted that relying largely on new gas plants to cross the energy gap could push up prices by as much as 52 per cent by 2016.

By contrast, a combination of new gas plant and wind farms will allow us to save fuel.

When the wind blows we can utilise an essentially free energy source to significantly cut the amount of gas we need to burn and hence the amount of gas we need to buy.

Ofgem predicts that incorporating sufficient wind power into our portfolio of electricity generators would limit price rises to 23 per cent by 2016. Energy prices are going to go up to build the new generators that we will need, but we have a choice between a costlier option that results in more pollution and a cheaper option that significantly cuts our greenhouse gas emissions.

Building new wind farms, it would seem, is win-win.

HOWEVER, someone who is worried about plans for a wind farm being built near them may take a different view.

Plenty of myths have sprung up about wind turbines, including that they are noisy, that they kill birds, and that they lower property prices. Let us take each of these in turn.

The overwhelming majority of wind farms are quiet neighbours. Visit one to hear for yourself.

You will find that you need to be standing practically under the wind turbine in order to hear anything at all. Particular wind farms under very unusual climatic conditions are audible from further away – but they represent less than one per cent of the total, and actual complaints about the noise of wind farms are very low. The industry is conducting research on that minority of sites with an aim of eliminating this phenomenon entirely.

Secondly, birds. Every man-made structure has an effect on wildlife. Before a wind farm can be built, its developers have to conduct an environmental impact assessment which will detail that effect. Copies of it should be submitted alongside the planning application for the wind farm, and will be available on your council’s website. Thanks to this process, a properly-sited wind farm will have little ecological impact – indeed, research has found that wind turbines account for less than 0.01 per cent of bird fatalities caused by humans.

Research on property prices around wind farms has found that, while house prices do fall when a planning application for a wind farm is submitted for an area nearby, when the wind farm is built, house prices go back up to their natural level. This effect is not properly taken into account in estate agents’ assessments, but does come out when a house actually goes on the market.

Even though the myths are not true, the industry wants wind farms to be thought of as good neighbours.

That is why RenewableUK, as the trade body for the industry, brought in our Community Commitment.

Wind farm developers have committed to pay £1,000 per year per megawatt of wind turbine capacity to the communities that host wind farms, over the lifetime of the project.

This money can be spent on anything that a community decides it needs – whether it be refurbishing a community centre or buying a new football strip for the local team. We believe that sharing the benefits of wind energy is the best way to demonstrate its value to a community.

Wind works. Wind power is already generating significant amounts of electricity for the UK, and over the next ten years, it could yet expand to the point where it is meeting nearly a third of our electricity needs.

In doing so, it will help cut our electricity bills and slash our carbon emissions, and spread the wealth created by this green energy revolution to communities all around the country.