MADAM – When I saw that David Drew had claimed that wind farms in the Stroud Valleys would create new jobs in the area, I wondered how he had arrived at that conclusion.
Wind farms do not appear to create work in the areas in which they are built, if all the deserted turbine-festooned hills of Galloway and Cornwall are any indicator.
There may, of course, be a short-lived upturn in activity while they are under construction, and the turbines will require maintenance and repair once running, but both are specialist and occasional jobs and I am not aware of Stroud having a pool of unemployed wind turbine specialists desperate for part-time opportunities.
But now you devote your front page to the ‘news’ that Dale Vince of Ecotricity, wind farm developer and owner of Forest Green Rovers FC is supporting David Drew’s election campaign with £20,000.
Mr Vince may glibly assert, without any justification, and belittling of the efforts of all those who have campaigned long and hard against it, that “It is unlikely that we would have had the waste incinerator imposed upon the district if David had been our MP”. But given the evident allegiance between the two, would we in fact be more likely to have a quite different inefficient, heavily subsidised, and no longer warranted, eyesore imposed upon us, in the form of windfarms on our Stroud Valley hillsides, if Mr Drew were to be successful in his bid for election?
Lynne Bradbury
Stonehouse
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