Editor

Readers of the Letters page will be familiar with the regular

missives from the folk implacably opposed to wind farms. On previous occasions I have felt obliged to correct some of the unbalanced or simply incorrect ‘facts’. Sadly, I find it necessary to do the same again.

As asserted by a correspondent last week, NRW’s own data show that nearly 2 million trees have been felled in building wind farms. However, the letter does not mention that the circa 1,000 hectares felled is only 0.33 per cent of the land under afforestation in Wales. All commercial forestry, whether on a prospective wind farm site or not, is felled on a regular basis to harvest the crop. The timber is a store of carbon derived from carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. If it is not burned as fuel it continues to represent a net reduction in greenhouse gases.

The relationship between forests and flooding is more complex than the correspondent admits. It was common practice to drain the uplands before conifer planting, to improve growing conditions for the trees. The intention was ‘to get the water off the hill’, but the result was that the hydrograph was sharpened and flooding was exacerbated further downstream. Any drainage scheme in an upland catchment has this effect. That a relatively small number of trees have been felled for wind farms is irrelevant. Future flooding risk will come from extreme rainfall caused by climate change.

It is true that wind farm construction generates a carbon footprint of which a significant part is due to the cement used in concrete. The life cycle carbon footprints of onshore and offshore wind generation (also hydro, solar and nuclear) are much lower than for any form of fossil fuel-powered generation.

The bottom line is that we are heading for a climate catastrophe.Rather than playing fast and loose with facts we need to accept the reality that carbon dioxide emissions must comedown.

John Gee Capel Dewi Aberystwyth

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