Powerful argument

Plans to erect wind turbines alongside Hinkley Point nuclear power station have created waves on the north Somerset coast. Crispin Aubrey argues the 'pro' case

If you write enthusiastically about renewable energy initiatives, as I do, it should come as a pleasant surprise to discover that one is planned on your own doorstep. Unless, of course, it's a wind farm. Within days of the announcement that a company with the engaging name of Your Energy wanted to erect 12 electricity-generating wind turbines on the north Somerset coast, the hackles of local residents were raised. Six months later, the battle lines are drawn, with supporters - of whom I have inevitably become an active member - and opponents head to head over whether the wind farm will enhance or scar a stretch of coastline known locally as Shurton Bars.

Shurton Bars has an interesting history. Its rocky foreshore is unusual along this part of the heavily tidal Severn estuary because it briefly exposes a small sandy beach, almost exclusively frequented by locals. In the 1950s, its sole inhabitants were an eccentric couple who stayed on the exposed headland in a Gypsy caravan, reportedly enjoying their isolation in the nude.

Then the nuclear industry arrived. In 1965, the first power station was opened at Hinkley Point, right next to Shurton Bars. The couple in the caravan objected unsuccessfully. A second massive block followed in 1977, making it the largest nuclear plant in the country, its giant pylon lines stretching away inland. The caravan is now an abandoned relic in a plot of overgrown scrubland.

So when Your Energy announced its plans, it seemed that, alongside the bulk of the nearby nuclear buildings and the large open cornfields of the site itself, this was absolutely the right place for Somerset's first wind farm - a symbol of a new direction for energy production in the shadow of the old.

But that's not how people who live nearby see it. It will "industrialise an unspoilt piece of beautiful coastline", they say, even though the top of the turbine towers will be roughly the same height as the nuclear block; it will be unbearably noisy, even though the nearest house is about 800 metres away; it will kill hundreds of birds, even though a survey has shown that very few either live in or fly through the wind farm fields; and it will cut house prices in the area by up to 35%, even though similar claims made in a leaflet issued by campaigners against a Scottish wind farm were dismissed as "misleading" by the Advertising Standards Authority.

Opposition publicity features the turbines as dark, oppressive and motionless on the skyline, never the elegant, rhythmically-turning structures that supporters welcome. But backing for the opponents has come from the regional daily paper, the Western Morning News, whose crusade against the wind farm is fronted by former broadcaster Noel Edmonds.

The controversy has already been peppered with personal attacks. A district councillor who took up cudgels against the proposal has been forced to withdraw from voting on it after the issue was referred to the council's monitoring officer. And Lady Gass, who lives in a nearby Elizabethan mansion, has been roundly attacked for allowing her fields to be used for the wind farm, even of abusing her status as the Lord Lieutenant of Somerset.

So intense is animosity in the immediate vicinity that those in favour of the scheme have often been too nervous to raise their voices. Fortunately, things have not yet got as bad as on the Isle of Wight, where another Your Energy proposal has faced vandalism of its equipment and there has been hate mail targeting the landowner's four-year-old son. But people I have known for 20 years will scarcely talk to me because I have publicly supported those whirling monstrosities.

At a recent public meeting in Nether Stowey, the village where I live, about four miles from the site, a packed hall barracked my presentation about the need to tackle climate change. My opponent, a representative of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, launched an attack on the business propriety of the developers, accusing them, to some amusement, of receiving funding from a company registered in the Marshall Islands. She was reduced by the end of the meeting to saying that the only way forward was to start building nuclear again.

With hundreds of local people still employed at the station, the proximity of Hinkley Point has inevitably coloured the debate. Part of the wind farm would be built on land earmarked 20 years ago for construction of a third nuclear power station, subsequently scrapped by the Tories as uneconomic. Incredulity that anybody can take wind power seriously is the typical reaction from the more outspoken employees. It is uneconomic, they say angrily, seeming to forget that the company running the Hinkley B plant, British Energy, was saved from going bust two years ago only by a £650m government bail-out.

Even more extraordinary claims have been made about the wind farm - for instance, that it will make people sick through barely audible "low frequency noise". One local resident is convinced that the vibration he has experienced down his chimney from a television aerial will be reproduced incessantly by the monsters on the skyline. Geoff Leventhall, an expert in low frequency noise, has become so incensed by the use of his name in support of such claims that he has publicly dissociated himself from any connection between his research and wind turbines.

What is ultimately disappointing is how reluctant many people are - even if they accept that the north Somerset coast itself would be in the frontline for flooding induced by climate change - to acknowledge that some form of renewable energy is likely to arrive in the neighbourhood, whether it's a wind farm, a biomass plant, or some other bright idea. "Put it all out to sea," they argue. "Certainly nowhere near us."

The negative reaction of those in the immediate vicinity is not reflected once you move out in a wider radius. The local sustainability group, Forum 21, has been able to collect more than 2,300 signatures for its petition in favour of the wind farm. But, in the end, the decision on whether it happens or not will be made by the dozen or so members of West Somerset district council's planning committee, whose views have so far remained diplomatically silent.

If the expectations of Your Energy are realised, the wind farm would easily generate the equivalent electricity used by all 15,000 households in west Somerset. If the farm doesn't get the go-ahead, I may have to consider increasing my own contribution to the battle against climate change - adding to the solar electricity panels I've already installed on my farmhouse roof by applying for permission to build a wind turbine in my own back yard ... then wait for the reaction.

· Crispin Aubrey is the editor of Wind Directions, the magazine of the European Wind Energy Association.