National Grid’s plans for huge substation and a line of pylons stretching up to 25 miles lead to protests
Opposition to wind power in rural Wales is said to be “total”, with communities threatening peaceful direct action and at least 20 groups fighting plans for 870 of the largest turbines in Powys alone.
“It’s only in the last few months that people have begun to understand the scale of what is happening. Even the business community is shocked. We can call on at least 5,000 people now for meetings,” said Richard Bonfield, former chair of mid-Wales Confederation of British Industry (CBI), who has helped organise protest rallies at the Welsh assembly in Cardiff and elsewhere.
“This is one of Wales’s biggest ever infrastructural projects and no one is now in favour except a few farmers. In the past we had a few small farms and turbines: we could accept them. But now we’re talking 120-metre-tall turbines and giant pylons. It is an environmental disaster.”
According to protesters, it is the applications by the National Grid company to build a 7.5-hectare (19-acre) substation at Abermule to link several major new windfarms in mid-Wales to the grid, and plans to erect possibly 25 miles of 46-metre, 400,000v pylons across lowland areas of Powys, Shropshire and Snowdonia, that have done the most to inflame passions.
“The pylons have made people sit up. A few years ago it was really only the people who could see the farms who were in opposition. It has now broadened out as people see the true scale of the developments,” said Caroline Evans, of the Brechfa Forest Energy Action Group near Carmarthen.
She expects her village to be surrounded by four windfarms and dozens of pylons: “Everyone is now affected. People are very fed up.”
Anger in mid-Wales at pylons and farms has spread north to Snowdonia and Anglesey, where hundreds of people have packed recent meetings called by protest groups to debate applications for more than 50 turbines.
Glyn Davies, the Conservative MP for Montgomeryshire, was heavily criticised last year for backing a Welsh anti-pylons direct action group. He said the entire region was now “up in arms” against the pylon and turbine plans. “They will industrialise the uplands with wind turbines and desecrate our valleys with hideous cables and pylons. The scale is almost impossible to comprehend,” he said.
