The Greenhouse

This was confirmed by later driving past the much larger wind farm at the delightfully-named Kettlesing Head on the Skipton-Harrogate road; it's just above Kettlesing Bottom, of course. The dozen or so turbines there are probably not quite as big as those proposed for Chelker but are fairly hefty - and don't seem too much of an eyesore, to be frank. Maybe it's the fact the landscape already seems somewhat alien thanks to golf balls and satellite dishes of Menwith Hill nearby.

Having come to this conclusion, I was then confounded to return home and read in the paper of tacit official acceptance that house values can be annihilated by the proximity of wind farms. Not a pleasant prospect, at Chelker or anywhere else, I thought as I looked across to Chelker from the kitchen window. But then, as I drove past the iconic Ferrybridge and Drax power stations on the way down south - whose elephantine cloudscapes I've always quite enjoyed - I wondered how much more the local houses might be worth without a dozen cooling towers in the vicinity.

I can't imagine that those living in the area were consulted in anything more than a perfunctory way before they were built. National necessity and geographical opportunity were overriding factors, with a healthy degree of economic expediency thrown in.

If we can now learn to subjugate profiteering to our communal energy needs, this is probably how it should be with wind farms as well. Then they should be in the right place and at the right size - rather than urban eco-bling or unnecessarily huge moorland monstrosities - and save a good deal of anxiety (and equity) at the same time. As I said yesterday, though, the only real answer is to reduce our energy and electricity consumption.