The Price of Ideals

“Are those what I think they are?” I asked incredulously, while walking down to the station with a friend. My friend affirmed that yes, the government had built a rather large wind farm off the shore of my home town.

This was a bit of a shock. I had absolutely no warning that they were building anything out there (although now I think about it, that would explain all the ‘oil rigs’ we saw in the summer); nothing in the newspapers or from my friends. It’s definitely an experience I would recommend to everyone, to have your perception of the world change so dramatically in a few seconds.

For the next five minutes, I mulled out loud my thoughts about the wind farm. I’m very much in favour of alternative energy (where appropriate) and given that we in Britain are ‘blessed’ with so much wind, it makes an awful lot of sense to take full advantage of it. I’ve always maintained that, sure, they might not look that nice, but it’s a small price to pay for clean energy. As a result, my reaction to newspaper reports on people complaining wind farms has always been, ‘Stop whining’. Yet my first thought on seeing the wind farm literally in my back yard was, ‘What the hell is that, and why couldn’t they build it somewhere else?’

After I’d calmed down a bit, I realised that it was pretty cool to have a wind farm in my back yard. Instead of alternative energy generation being something of an abstraction in my life, here it is, a permanent fixture on the horizon. If they had a way to make the windmill invisible, I wouldn’t say no, but it’s not a big deal. Best of all, it gives me vital ammunition in any future argument I have…

I will try to get a photo of the wind farm soon.