It's time to get excited about British onshore wind energy

By Gabe Trodd

Labour must develop and come to terms with how we feel, as a party, about onshore wind energy. The recent discussions about Vestas and the outlook for British onshore wind energy clearly highlighted: the need for much more thought on what we’re doing with onshore wind; how crucial it is for Labour activists to get behind wind energy and popularise it across the country (like you would with your football team); and the gaping hole that has previously existed within the party for a solid, totemic red-green movement, to lead the charge on the ground. Because opinion surveys routinely show that just over eight out of ten people are in favour of wind energy, and less than one in ten (around 5%) are against it.

Reading Paul Kingsnorth’s recent impassioned rebuttal of British wind energy and the Bright Green Environmental movement at Comment is Free, ‘A wind farm is not the answer’, I realised that amidst all the current green-anorak talk of carbon reduction targets, gigawatt hours, parts per million of carbon, peer-reviewed papers and "sustainable development", there's a typically romantic British resonance at the pulsating heart of the objections and arguments over British wind energy.

Indeed, the picture that particular article expertly painted was vividly bleak and illustrative of much of the high-profile opinion across the country – a distant, sober cousin to Ted Hughes’ story, the Iron Giant. It was a world of Orwellian industrialisation, needless and brutal scarring of the virginal British landscape, with uncompromising materialism and ‘structures, each made of steel and mounted on hundreds of tons of concrete’.

So how can onshore British wind energy be popularised? Well, Labour activists need to get excited about British wind energy and vocalise their own account of the future. At various stages in my life, I’ve had three youthful ambitions: to be a professional drummer, along the lines of Keith Moon; to be a professional actor; and to be a commercial airline pilot. Unfortunately, the onset of puberty put many of those ambitions into some fresh perspective; although, in eventually finding a real passion for the environment, my interest in aviation became especially conflicted – even more so than when I harboured ambitions to be Keith Moon.

To have reformed childhood hopes of being a commercial airline pilot, whilst at the same time being quite unflinchingly adamant that more needs to be done about the aviation industry’s emissions is an odd position to be in. So over the last couple of years, I’ve come to replace my instinctive passion for the grandeur, untold possibilities and theatre of aviation, with the grandeur, untold possibilities and theatre of British wind energy – majestic onshore wind turbines set subtly against the British landscape. I think this is a position Labour needs to popularise. Let’s take the energy, glamour and marvel that has existed around aviation, and invest it in wind energy.

To completely fly in the face of the most oft-vocalised opinion, I happen to think wind turbines look fantastic – stark, moody and paradoxically able to tap into long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs and dog lovers' soft British nostalgia for traditional countryside windmills, whilst being inherently interwoven with the futuristic and aerodynamic resonance that my youthful interest in aviation was built around.

As an island, Britain has 40% of Europe’s wind resource, with strong winds both on and offshore. This is an opportunity to be a world pioneer and it's a position we should proudly maximise as a country. Most promising of all is the glittering potential that exists for green collar jobs. To overlook this free British fuel, frame it with a depressed, steel-tinted vision of savage industrialisation or put too high a reliance on offshore wind generation and fledgling micro-generation technology would tragically and irreversibly condemn the UK to: missing our renewable energy targets; falling short of our commitment to tackle climate change; drifting away from energy independence at a time when it is essential; and contributing to a significant deficit in the country’s short-term energy supply.

The rise of the green agenda will have to correct the uncompromising, post-Thatcherite, industrialised materialism that has so ruthlessly ravaged the environment and its resources. But amidst the mountains of landfill and rivers of plastic shopping bags, wind turbines should be our rural lighthouses - silent, stoic poetic warnings against the pitfalls of failing to live within our means.  Beacons of hope and symbols of a better, less polluted future.