October 25, 2004
Ar nós na gaoithe
Maybe one day someone will explain to me why the very people who object so strenuously to one-off houses in the countryside have no problem at all with the building of wind farms. Now, I'm all for clean, renewable energy, and there is certainly no shortage of available wind energy in Ireland. But a wind farm (even if there only a handful of wind turbines) is an industrial installation and makes far more impact on the landscape than a house.
First of all, you need to find a mountainside, preferably deserted - there's plenty of them in the West. Some of them are planted with forestry - others are covered with layers of bog. To access the site, roads need to be constructed. Once the roads are built, then the digging can begin. A 70-foot turbine needs a solid foundation - a hole that could accommodate a two story house works best. Digging through bog is easy enough. However, the bogland covering most mountains in the West is a thin blanket covering solid rock - either limestone or something more solid such as basalt. Putting a hole in a layer of rock doesn't require a pick and shovel anymore - either an industrial jackhammer affixed to a hydraulic arm on a digger or bulldozer does the trick nicely - blasting with explosives works pretty well too. All that's needed then is the turbine itself - set into the hole with concrete - and ready to start generating green and guilt-free electricity. Who could complain about this?
Well, it's hard to imagine an installation that is more noticeable than a wind farm. Their very purpose requires that they are constructed along the skyline. In truth, I don't find them too obtrusive myself. But close-up, their impact is more noticeable. On large sites (anywhere between 50 and 200 turbines), the size of the site is considerable. And to build a farm that size requires a huge amount of engineering work - vast areas of bog or trees must be cleared, drainage ditches need to be dug and a large network of roads must be built. Bogland serves a useful purpose on mountains - it regulates the amount of water that runs off the hillsides. Once it is removed, rainfall runs straight down the hill, increasing the chance (and speed) of flooding downstream.
The construction of the road network (often a glorified network of boreens) on the site often puts pressure on the public road network in its vicinity. Since most wind farms are in fairly remote areas, the roads are usually narrow and certainly not suited to convoys of earthmovers and dump trucks thundering in and out of the construction site. Since the bigger wind farms require so much material, quarries are usually excavated on site. This is ironic, since it's tremendously difficult to get planning permission for quarries in their own right.
However, it is when the construction is complete that the biggest and most long-term impact can be noticed. I was hill-walking some weeks ago around the site of a small (and sensitively constructed) wind farm. By constructing new boreens to service the wind turbines, it was possible to access hills that were previously inaccessible, including a hidden lake whose water was supposed to have curative properties (no one chanced to drink it, mind). At the entrance, I stopped to admire the handiwork of the stonemason that had created two piers from the local stone available on the hill. At the same time, I regretted the fact that, soon, the hill would be off-limits. The piers would soon hold gates, and would serve to keep walkers such as myself off the hill. I don't really blame the developer - until the ludicrous insurance laws in Ireland are fixed, he has little other option.
In the meantime, as more farms are built, more and more mountainsides will become inaccessible and, to some extent, industrialised. A wind farm provides almost no employment locally once construction is complete, other than for security (and that is to keep locals and visitors out). And that's assuming that the construction is done properly. This week, in Galway, some of the construction companies involved in the building of the wind farm at Derrybrien were fined for causing fish kills in the river Owendalulleegh River. The kills were caused as a result of the landslides that occurred at the wind farm construction site. The Derrybrien site will eventually contain 70 turbines, and they will have to generate a lot of electricity to make up for the damage done by the landslide - tons of peatland and trees ripped from the Derrybrien hillside around the Sliabh Aughties. [The current head of An Taisce cluelessly described the local people as nimbies last year - given how upset members of An Taisce become at the prospect of rural housing, you'd wonder if she has ever visited a wind farm].
There is a sense of a great opportunity being missed when it comes to wind energy. My own preference would be that there should only be either large or small but not in between. For large wind farms (100+ turbines), they should be offshore. A couple of miles out, and no-one can see them, and the wind supply is greater and more constant. The smaller ones could be built nearly anywhere. It's a pity that Irish farmers have not embraced the opportunities of wind power in the same way as the Danes and Germans. There, farmers group together to erect a few turbines on their land and become at least self-sufficient in electricity, and manage to supply a bit extra to the grid. It means that there are small clumps of wind turbines visible pretty much everywhere in the countryside, but they are no more intrusive than electricity pylons. They are also handsomely grant-aided by the EU, so the financial outlay is not huge. Of course, given that many farmers find that they cannot get planning permission to build houses for their offspring, so their chances of putting up a few windmills are probably slim too.
Posted by Monasette at October 25, 2004 10:20 PM