Following a recent article in which Mr Jones was fiercely critical of onshore wind it’s good see the balance being redressed by this impassioned response from a Radio Times reader:
In this age of scrupulous impartiality, when any opinion has to be counterbalanced by an opposing view – no matter how reasonable (or not) one or other might be – you did at least head Griff Rhys Jones’s column as a “Point of View”.
This should have given readers the important clue that the arguments put forward weren’t facts. This was particularly so of his assertion that wind farms are a vestige of hypocritical green tokenism, sited at random – and thus without any planning or foresight.
Domestic-scale windmills on houses in West London are hypocritical green tokenism; on-shore megawatt-scale turbines sited after lengthy assessment to ensure their positive contribution to the environment, are not. These are the quickest, cheapest, most flexible – and most easily removable power generation generation technology we have.
They are part of a working landscape managed and modified by man for several thousand years. That landscape never was, and should not now be, preserved in aspic – otherwise we might as well rename it Disneyland. J. Holt, Herts.