Upland Landscape Protection
Society

Don't Trust Power

Why the wind factories are a rip-off

Aren’t wind factories Green Energy?

Not always, no. ‘Green Energy’ means renewable, long-term energy management where the impact of production is minimal on the environment in which it takes place. Like hydroelectric schemes, wind factories — these are not farms — potentially have major detractions. No landscape can remain unscarred by a major construction initiative, giant blades create unexpected environmental hazards such as noise pollution, and like anything else the huge turbines break down. Across Britain, Europe and North America, lobby groups have rallied against wind-energy initiatives as the real cost of ostensibly ‘Green’ corporate entrepreneurialism becomes apparent.

Yes but...it’s surely not as bad as Coal or Gas?

So the press-releases of the corporations behind them would have us believe. Wind factories don't produce carbon emissions, but they contaminate the surrounding landscape both visually and ecologically. Meridian's turbines will be 160 metres high, and require a supersized crane to install them. Between the two proposals, which lie fifteen kilometres apart, though under the jurisdiction of  different councils, there are 326 towers proposed. In cases these require twelve-metre wide roads — free-ways for pest species — to be bulldozed through some of the last remaining mammelated tussock grassland in New Zealand. This is no less ugly than roads being cut through native forest. TrustPower's industrial site is to be situated in Dunedin's primary water-catchment area, with inevitable chemical run-off, large-scale siltation of the local streams (800, 000 cubic metres of spoil), and trauma inflicted on rare local species such as the New Zealand falcon and jewelled gecko. Local vistas will never be the same again.

But we have to make sacrifices, don’t we?

Certainly, but shouldn’t our sacrifices be carefully assessed in terms of their long-term benefit?In the coming century, as the industrialised world becomes more intense, more competitive and claustrophobic, the integrity of our green spaces will have a direct bearing on our standing internationally. Nature takes time. As wind technology itself attests, new, hitherto unthinkable technological solutions to problems pop up in every sector of human endeavour, from sculpture to dermatology, at a speed that has no parallel in human history. A far less intrusive Cook Strait tidal-energy proposal, technologically viable from 2008, may alone produce twice New Zealand’s present total energy consumption. The TrustPower wind factory has a planned obsolescence of seventy-five years, provided that its technology isn’t quickly outmoded. Conversely, vivisected tussockland and pin-cushion bog will never recover.

Yeah, but I’d still rather have my bar-heater.

Opponents of wind factories use bar-heaters too (and, indeed, the Upland Landscape Protection Society in no way opposes all wind energy). But in a mere fifty years, if the catapulting increase in consumption is left unchecked, New Zealand will require three times its present energy production: more dead rivers, more ruined views. This of course is the disaster that many enterprising business-men eagerly await. Like Project Aqua, the wind factories are not responsible ventures but merely one more destructive side-effect of a poorly supervised free-market political economy. We need long-term scientific research, a centralised government initiative to restructure energy consumption at a basic level, and just a little patience, not stupid development.