Mid-Wales Wildlife and Tourism Threatened by Industrial-Scale Wind Farm Plans
If you thought Mid-Wales’s tourism offering was under-developed, you’d be right. Mid-Wales does it quietly. No brash multiples here. No theme parks. No large attractions, wooing holiday-makers with bright lights, loud music and promises of a good time, whilst getting them to part with oodles of cash. No, what tourists come to Mid-Wales for is something far more subtle…in fact, almost esoteric.
It’s peace. It’s quiet. It’s wide open spaces, fresh air, big skies, scurrying clouds and the breath-taking beauty of its hills, valleys, rivers and, right up there with the best: its abundance of wildlife. You can be at one with it all in Mid-Wales. Experience it up-close and personal. Probably Mid-Wales’s most famous resident, the Red Kite, was persecuted to extinction in England and Scotland, and in Wales, only one breeding pair remained by 1930. A Kite using the thermals created by the undulating uplands to gain ever greater heights above you; now that’s a sight to behold! With a wingspan of around 1.6 metres and weighing in at between 0.8 and 1.3 Kg, seeing the bird’s acrobatics as it feeds at one of Mid-Wales’s Red Kite Feeding Centres is a real treat. But, of course, the Red Kite is far from the only wildlife in Mid-Wales. Low intensity agriculture means that bird-life is teeming, and spend a little time on open, common land and you might catch a glimpse of a hare or two as well. Acid bog and peatland is home to myriad species of invertebrates. Small rodents abound. The Pine Marten has made a return and at least three species of deer make their home in Mid-Wales’s forests. Beavers have been re-introduced in Montgomeryshire, and Radnorshire is home to several rare species of bat.
Nature-loving tourists come to experience the well-kept secret that is Mid-Wales’s wildlife. But how will that, and the income these tourists bring - vital to Mid-Wales’s economy – be impacted by the introduction of wind farms on a scale never before seen in the UK? Well, the answer is simple: badly. Bird and bat deaths from collisions with turbine blades are well documented. In fact, in the US, a wind operator has recently been fined over $8M for causing the death of 150 eagles during a decade of turbine blade collisions. In the Netherlands, operators are having to turn turbines off for five months to allow for migratory birds to make safe passage. Hardly wildlife-friendly, is it? The enormous concrete bases that turbines need involve the removal of huge quantities of carbon-sequestering peat, peat that took thousands of years to form. Rare mosses, lichens and other low order plants are all compromised by the infrastructure required to build and operate a wind farm. Which self-respecting, nature-loving tourist wants to squander their precious holidays by trading one industrialised setting for another? That is what acres of concrete, hard landscaping, pylons, sub-stations, solar arrays, giant, 220-metre high metal turbines, batteries and access roads are… whatever developers, operators, and local or central government try telling you.
