Local protests don’t stop windfarms. Subsidy cuts do

Here in the valley of the River Tove in south Northamptonshire my chickens are laying copiously, my ducks are quacking loudly, and my Jack Russell, Polly, is yapping gaily in celebration of a great victory: the Spanish energy company, which for more than three years has been threatening to desecrate this pleasant bit of countryside with a line of eight giant wind turbines, each taller than Big Ben, has suddenly said it is abandoning the plan after deciding that it is not feasible. The company, Gamesa, belatedly revealed that it would not after all be seeking planning permission for this wind farm in a curt and otherwise uninformative little letter to the Conservative Member of Parliament for South Northamptonshire, Andrea Leadsom, who has gallantly championed the cause of the local community that has been campaigning vigorously against it.

I can’t tell you what a relief this is, not only for the bats whose little lungs will be saved from bursting under the air pressure caused by wind turbines, nor for the horses at Towcester racecourse who will be spared the fear and confusion provoked by the ‘shadow flicker’ of their rotating blades, but also for the many human residents of the valley, including me, whose homes were expected to fall in value by at least 30 per cent if the ‘Tove Renewable Energy Park’, so-called by its planners to suggest bucolic peace and ecological virtue, were to go ahead.