Guernsey seems to have resigned itself to having an offshore wind farm.
On land we are already hemmed in by over-development. The only remaining wilderness we have access to is the maritime one, and now its characteristic expanse is to be interrupted by a highly-visible offshore power station (a wind farm).
The current proposal is for 50 to 60 particularly massive wind turbines, each 278 metres (910-feet) high, i.e. 256 feet taller than those of the UK’s largest wind farm, Hornsea-2, and 390 feet taller than Blackpool tower. But whereas Hornsea-2 is situated 55 miles from land, our wind farm would be within Guernsey’s 10-mile limit – highly visible whether from L’Ancresse, Vazon or Pleinmont (the location is undecided).
It seems the States has no intention of being swayed on account of visuals, labelling the issue ‘subjective’ and adding: ‘while some view renewable energy installations as an eyesore, for others it makes for an interesting horizon’ (Offshore wind webpage).
Besides, I suspect most people are so convinced of the environmental argument for wind farms that they would support any such proposal. That is a pity because as far as I am concerned wind farms only deaden the natural environment; the wind is literally deadened when transformed into electricity, and even the weather is altered. Bird-strikes are such an issue that new UK wind turbines are to be painted black. Then there is the damage to seabed ecology, the effects on wildlife of undersea (and above-sea) noise pollution, electromagnetic pollution from the huge undersea power conduits, and the massed shore-to-turbine wireless communications, to name a few.
What about climate change?
Only indirectly can a wind farm assist in reducing greenhouse gas emissions: where a jurisdiction that consumes the farm’s wind energy takes that opportunity to permanently reduce its own emissions.
But in a world of increasing energy consumption this is not guaranteed. Some jurisdictions have little scope for reducing emissions; of France’s 46 power stations only two are fossil-fuelled. Gordon Hughes (Prof. of Economics, ex senior adviser on energy and environmental policy, World Bank) has said to me personally: ‘Jersey and Guernsey currently get most of their electricity ... from France. ... generation using fossil fuels ... accounts for no more than 3% of French electricity output, so the reduction in carbon emissions from use of offshore wind output in Jersey and Guernsey would be tiny’.
Wind farms also contribute to climate change. Wind turbines mix the ‘atmospheric boundary layer’, which has been calculated to warm the climate to a small-but-significant degree, warming (continental USA) 10 times more than solar panels for equal power generation (Miller, 2018, ‘Climate Impacts of Wind Power’). Greenhouse gases are also emitted in the manufacture, installation, maintenance and disposal of wind farms.
These emissions are very small compared to fossil-fuel power stations, but there is an interesting corollary here.
Wind farms are said to attain ‘carbon neutrality’ within a few years of operation. This is when a system removes as much carbon, i.e. greenhouse gas, from the environment as it emits. Plants and very much else in the natural world remove carbon, but wind turbines do not, and so one wonders how a wind farm could ever achieve carbon neutrality. The answer is that renewable energy technologies such as wind farms are deemed to ‘remove’ carbon emissions to the degree that they emit less than a conventional power station would. Perhaps this is why some people believe that putting wind farms in natural habitats is beneficial for those habitats. In reality, wind turbines remove no emissions at all, but do warm, deaden, and cut up natural environments.
Although most economists, businesses, techno-utopians and true conservationists say they want to halt climate change, this does not mean they share the same motive and want the same outcome. The belief that they do has led people to believe in an impossible conflation of conflicting visions: that one can employ a wind farm to exploit the natural environment for cheap, ‘clean’ energy, while simultaneously healing the environment, getting rich from doing so, making the view more interesting, and being ethical and scientific.
The potential fallout of hidden motives in ‘halting climate change’ versus ‘protecting the environment’ is exemplified in the extreme by Haverly’s paper, ‘Nuclear Explosions for Large Scale Carbon Sequestration’ (2025), which seriously proposes detonating a nuclear bomb in the ocean to halt climate change. The paper: ‘This nuclear detonation will cause extreme destruction and long term radiation to the detonation site. Choosing a barren seafloor can mitigate the ecosystem destruction, but it will still be uninhabitable for decades’.
The climate interests of government, business and techno-utopians often align with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, i.e. a drive to open up the natural environment to ‘sustainable’ energy exploitation, and to digitise society and create a dense telecommunications infrastructure (the States recently approved Starlink and the ‘massive power hog’ 5G). But if this revolution succeeds, people could eventually look out upon the world, at the massed wind and solar farms, and realise they are not looking at a natural landscape protected by a conscientious society, but a despoiled industrial landscape, created for wealth and control.
The world should be reducing greenhouse gas emissions by consuming a lot less energy. Society is unwilling to make that sacrifice – consumption is increasing instead – and so nature is being forced to make the sacrifice for us.
Andrew Lee
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