WHO'S BRIEFING THE BRIEF?

Signs of desperation in the nimby camp are appearing thick and fast.

Not content merely to hurl extremely serious allegations about our democratically-elected representatives about the place, the loons of VVASP are now trying to frighten the good people of Harvington by claiming that "thousands" of trucks will be going through their village.

"Thousands"? Why not say "millions"? Why not - "Eight hundred trillion pantechnicons will crash through your living room and ruin your nice new rug"?

Meanwhile, the solicitor retained by VVASP - sorry, the Anti-Windfarm Working Party - is getting rather hot under the collar. Vide his latest blast, lobbed at ScottishPower Renewables and copied to his obscure "clients" and the Wychavon planning officer.

It's all to do with bats, apparently. A relatively calm report on ecology and habitat was filed by Baker Consultants. SPR duly responded. The solicitor went wild.

It doesn't help that, after several months of correspondence, the solicitor gets the name of the person he's writing to wrong. And, reading back through that correspondence, it's almost impossible to figure out what point he's trying to make. Rather like a drunk who's determined to start an argument, he takes any old sentence from the last SPR letter and conjures up all manner of strange assertions and bizarre scenarios - and all this in language which strays from legalese into something approaching abuse.

Of course, he's working for a fee (although he did halve a recent invoice because the incompetent nimbies of Church Lench Parish Council had overspent their "Windfarm Working Party" budget and he didn't want to make them look bad). And who pays the piper calls the tune. Which means that, in this case, a glaring non-issue is being treated as if it's proof positive that ScottishPower Renewables are in league with the devil and determined to murder bats - even ones that don't exist!

Now, we at Wind of Change are anything but anti-bat. We rather like the creatures, and we certainly don't want to see them harmed in any way.

But trying to pick a fight over whether one set of recordings used unidirectional or omnidirectional mikes is, well, let's face it, clutching at straws. And going off on one over SPR's reasonable point that most nature conservation agencies have recognised the need to mitigate the effects of climate change for the sake of the natural world - riffing hilariously on the ramifications of that dangerously irresponsible viewpoint (at one stage, he seems to suggest that such an argument, logically, should mean buying air-conditioning units to keep the bats happy and forgetting all about renewables) - well, that's not clutching at straws. That's drowning in a sea of hopelessness.

He's been told to savage SPR over bats. It's about the only thing the nimbies who run Church Lench reckon might scupper the plans. Unfortunately, though, the poor solicitor's got nothing to go on. The nookies of Lench keep sending him into battle with a pea-shooter. And no peas.

And who's paying for these letters? Who keeps saying, "Go on, write to them again" (even though he knows that he can do little more than smear a sheet of paper with something smelly and post it)? Well, guess who.

The people of the area who don't oppose the windfarm are paying for all this nonsense. The dark forces behind the "Windfarm Working Party" (which knows nothing about windfarms and has done nothing to enlighten itself) keep shoving him forward, snarling: "Go on, hit her! Here's some money - now hit her!" And the money they keep giving him is what you paid in taxes.

Value for money? No, not really. Especially when all the poor chap can do is wave a used tissue in SPR's face and make a noise like Chewbacca.

So - the big question: if the Anti-Windfarm Fig-Leaf Committee is paying for yet more pointless epistles - "Go on, call her a rude word! Go on!" - does that mean that there won't be any money left to pay for the solicitor to address the planning committee on behalf of twelve angry men and a rather bored dog? Have they given up on that plan, knowing that Wychavon District Council has heard plenty about this dodgy Working Party and the game might be up? Are these febrile attempts at hurting SPR's feelings simply the last gasp of a failed protest campaign?

Let's hope so.

COMPREHENSIVE INFORMATION

As we amble along towards the special meeting of the Development Control Committtee later this month, inevitably the nookies of VVASP are whipping up hatred and hysteria. You'd hope that recent developments in the United States, which seem to link hate-fuelled political propaganda with the shooting of politicians and nine-year old children, might have forced a rethink in such immoral activities. But no. VVASP continues to do what it has always done: spread fear and loathing by withholding useful information and peddling ludicrous myths.

Currently, VVASP would appear to be concentrating on two areas of concern. Noise, it would seem, is rather off the agenda (it was recently discovered that VVASP had been telling the inhabitants of a travellers' site at the bottom of Hipton Hill that the noise from the turbines would be "deafening"!), probably because it's a bit of a non-starter.

No, the two issues VVASP are exploiting to whip up the mob are house prices and shadow flicker.

House prices, first. It's perhaps a measure of the need some people feel for conformity that certain Lenchians are still prepared to believe that the windfarm will drive the value of their property down. This mad claim was one of those which the ASA rubbished, pointing out that VVASP had no evidence to support it and that they had selectively misquoted a report which in fact concluded that there is no clear correlation between windfarms and house prices.

Furthermore, the briefing document which appeared in the House of Commons Library a short while ago examines a variety of studies and concludes that, while there is no evidence at all of windfarms having a negative effect on house prices, there is some evidence which suggest that property values rise faster in proximity to a working windfarm.

So not only are VVASP spreading fear about something that is categorically not true - they're deliberately misleading their neighbours over the potential positive impact of the windfarm on their house prices!!!

Next, shadow flicker. It's clear that hardly anybody in the area knows what this is. Shadow flicker is a rare and unusual phenomenon and its effects can be mitigated. Windfarm developers know what causes it (and it only happens within a short range of turbines, under certain conditions, and in rooms which windows of a particular size), which means that they have been able to take steps to avoid it.

In short, shadow flicker isn't really an issue.

But what the nimbies keep going on about (if only they knew it) is something else altogether - shadow casting. Again, only something that happens within a defined area, and not something which has ever been proven to cause problems. Indeed, a progamme shown on BBC4 last night, about the Normans, had the presenter talking to camera as he walked through a windfarm in Normandy in a bright and breezy day. The "noise" of the windfarm was pretty much non-existent (which is why he was able to talk to the camera throughout), and the sweeping shadows of the blades were confined to a pretty narrow radius.

Of course, if you can point out that shadow flicker has, in the past, proven to be a nuisance, and you can then confuse people over what shadow flicker is (pretending, for example, that it's the same as shadow casting), then you can whip up yet more madness for your own devious ends.

But there's something that VVASP almost certainly haven't told anybody. In November 2008 (at the very time that VVASP was setting itself up specifically to fight ScottishPower Renewables, and less specifically to fight anybody who did not agree with them), Worcestershire County Council published its final report on renewables.

Independent consultants had identified a range of sites in Worcestershire which would be ideally suited for windfarm developments.

Church Lench, it was determined, was well-placed to support a windfarm of six large turbines (one more than is actually proposed) and there were no clear grounds for opposing them.

Bishampton and Throckmorton (just down the road) could support six large turbines and four large turbines respectively. Only in the case of Throckmorton airfield was it deemed relevant to note that there are properties nearby.

Overall, some twenty-five sites throughout Worcestershire were identified as being essentially windfarm-friendly. The three mentioned above were in the first category of sites "which present few substantial barriers to development".

You can read the full report here: http://www.worcestershire.gov.uk/cms/pdf/Renewable%20Final%20Report%20PDF%20December.pdf

So, while VVASP continue to promote the fiction that they are poor downtrodden villagers being unfairly menaced by a major energy concern, the reality is that their county council had already spotted that Church Lench and several surrounding areas were just right for wind energy developments.

What next? Will VVASP start spreading the rumour that Worcestershire County Councillors have been taking backhanders as well?

GLOBAL NEWS

Anyone who thinks that the windfarm issue is a small, localised one is desperately out-of-touch. But then, that's what happens if you listen to VVASP.

Wind energy is currently a bit of a sticking point between the world's superpower and the pretender to that title. The US is very unhappy about China's 'subsidies' to its own wind turbine manufacturers. China has doubled its capacity pretty much year on year since 2005 - it is now the world leader in wind generating capacity.

The US isn't far behind. Take Texas, usually thought of as the Oil State. Texas has invested massively in wind energy. Just don't mention climate change. In Texas, where it's considered heresy to do so, it is the economics of wind power which make total sense.

So, while the US and China slug it out over who's the daddy when it comes to generating wind energy, Europe is also forging ahead. The European Wind Energy Association has studied all 27 National Renewable Energy Action Plans from EU member states. If the commitments are met, then the EU will exceed its target of 20% electricity from renewable sources by the end of this decade.

In fact, 34% of Europe's energy is expected to come from renewables by 2020. 14% of that - by far the highest proportion - will come from wind. And with the UK set to generate 78.3 terrawatt-hours of electricity from wind alone in 2020, we will finally have climbed the league table, from third-from-bottom to second place, behind Germany.

While the fanatics of VVASP - currently doing all they can to whip up looney hysteria in advance of the planning meeting - seek to pretend that they are somehow alone on this planet, the rest of the world is taking wind energy extremely seriously. The United States seem to be embarrassed and angry at the fact that China is way ahead of them on this score, and Europe is looking in good shape to deliver a pretty impressive percentage of wind energy by 2020.

By the way, VVASP's latest shockingly shoddy gambit is to claim that, if - that is, IF - the Lenchwick Windfarm gets the go-ahead from Wychavon District Council, it will only be because money has changed hands.

Yep, that's right. The thugs and frauds of VVASP are preparing the ground for their imminent trouncing by spreading the rumour that Wychavon District Councillors might be taking bribes!!!

Now, okay, we're used to the manic nimbies stooping lower than a snake's bottom and spreading rumours of a truly disgusting nature. But this really does represent a new low. They're saying that, if they lose the battle of Lenchwick, it won't be because they have lied repeatedly and never really had a leg to stand on. It'll be because their democratically-elected local representatives are corrupt.

Ah well. Takes one to know one, eh?

TWISTED LOGIC

You can tell when the nimbies are on the ropes and panicking slightly because they start saying some really strange things.

Take the person who has commented on the Wychavon District Council website calling for a survey of all supporters of the proposed Lenchwick Windfarm to find out how many live 600-800 metres from a windfarm.

We support this idea, and would also call upon the Council to find out how many objectors are Sagittarians, how many are left-handed and how many like their eggs sunny-side-up.

Of course, the Council has more important things to worry about, right now. But it's interesting, isn't it, to note that the nookies feel that only people currently living within a kilometre of wind turbines should be allowed to support them. If this was flipped around, and only people currently living within a kilometre of a windfarm were allowed to object to the Lenchwick development, the number of objectors would be reduced to ... nil.

By a similar token, only people living within a mile of a nuclear power station should be allowed to oppose nuclear power, and only people with fins should be allowed to worry about our depletion of the ocean's fish stocks.

The person who made this daft observation really should be kept away from sharp objects. It's a typical nimby manoeuvre. Only mad anti-windfarm protesters, pumped up on VVASP's lies, are allowed to have a say. Everyone else - and especially those who have taken the trouble to visit windfarms and understand the issues involved - must be silenced. That's how VVASP work.

Here's another example of lousy nimby thinking. Needled by a report submitted by BLoW about the viciousness and deviousness of VVASP behaviour, the clerk to Church Lench Parish Council was told to respond (none of the other five Parish Councils concerned has bothered).

The good news is that the nimbies are finally willing to admit that nearly thirty per cent of the parishioners polled in 2009 didn't bother to reply (so, naturally, they are automatically disenfranchised - still, makes a difference from VVASP claiming "82% of residents against").

The clerk also admits that the Lord of the Nimbies offered to help the "chair" of Church Lench Parish Council find some new parish councillors. No kidding. It's a bit like Robert Mugabe offering to help find some suitable Zimbabwean politicians.

Except that ... how can a Parish Council which doesn't exist (because its members have been forced to resign) have a "chair"? How was this individual appointed "chair"?

The clerk goes on to insist that the Windfarm Working Party did not agree to work alongside VVASP. This, according to the clerk to the nimbies, is erroneous, factually incorrect and defamatory.

Except that Church Lench Parish Council's minutes from July 2009 make it abundantly clear that VVASP and the Working Party agreed to divvy up responsibilities and share the workload. And, of course, the Working Party declared that VVASP should have sole responsibility for "educating" the community, even though Worcestershire County Council had already declared that it was the job of local authorities to pass effective and reliable education about renewables to the communities concerned.

(Further proof that the Windfarm Working Party was operating in complete ignorance of or contempt for the law can be found in the document, released in November 2007, concerning Councils' Powers to Discharge their Functions, which was published by NALC. This clearly states that 'Working Groups' and 'Working Parties' are committees covered by the 1972 Local Government Act, and are therefore subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. The Working Party has consistently argued that it is not covered by the FoI Act and can keep their activities secret. Evidently, just as the Working Party made no attempt to find out about windfarms, so they didn't try very hard to understand the law.)

The clerk states that the purpose of the Working Party was to provide "good communication" between the six affected Parish Councils. Where's the evidence of that "good communication"? And then, the clerk says that the Working Party was established to prevent duplication of effort. Basically, it meant that all six Parish Councils would not have to pay independently for legal advice or noise measurement surveys.

But realistically, how many of the six Parish Councils were likely to have consulted a solicitor and organised an "independent" noise measurement survey? The only Parish Council that was really interested in wasting public money on such things was the new-look Church Lench PC with its massive nimby bias. The others were fleeced of several hundred pounds and then told to submit a solicitor's response without much in the way of consultation. That's the "good communication" we were hearing about.

The noise measurement survey, part-funded by our own Parish Councils, revealed that the figures supplied by ScottishPower Renewables in the planning application were accurate. Not one Parish Council asked to see the results of the noise survey. One has to ask, how many of them were really bothered? And how many members of the public - who to all intents and purposes paid for that survey - have been told that ScottishPower Renewables' figures are good?

The real killer statement from the clerk is this one: "The logic of the working party is self-evident; one small parish council can have little effect in representing the views of the great majority of their parishioners against those of a multinational giant such as Iderbrola."

That is Church Lench speaking, because there was and is no such "great majority" in the other parishes (and not much of a majority in Church Lench). The decision to refer to the parent company, rather than ScottishPower Renewables, is also typical of the nimby movement. The clerk and her councillors are damned by their very own words. They used the money of the Parish Councils where there was no majority of opinion against the windfarm to fund their own witless campaign against the developer.

Again: "It is only by combining the skills, abilties and cash resources of several councils that one can hope to affect the outcome."

She might have added - "and by ignoring opinion polls, democracy and the law." So Church Lench had committed itself to affecting the outcome of the planning application before that planning application had arrived. That's a clear breach of Parish Council responsibilities (they're supposed to remain neutral and impartial until there's a planning application for them to look at). And, as the clerk's wording makes abundantly clear, one Parish Council had decided to ponce off the others in order to pursue its own policy, regardless of the views of the public who, without knowing it, were funding all this nonsense.

Perhaps if the Windfarm Working Party had simply tried to research windfarms (as they said they were going to when they were trying to get their hands on everybody else's money), there might have been some merit in the scheme. And if they'd bothered to check up on the law, rather than blithely insisting that they were accountable to nobody.

Maybe a survey should be carried out to discover how many members of the Windfarm Working Party have ever been 600-800 metres from a windfarm.

STATEMENT OF NEED

In its 2007 document, 'Meeting the Energy Challenge', the DTI published a 'Renewables Statement of Need'. It should be required reading for all Wychavon District Councillors.

Take this paragraph:

New renewable projects may not always appear to convey any particular local benefit, but they provide crucial national benefits. Individual renewable projects are part of a growing proportion of low-carbon generation that provides benefits shared by all communities both through reduced emissions and more diverse supplies of energy, which helps the reliability of our supplies. This factor is a material consideration to which all participants in the planning system should give significant weight when considering renewable proposals. These wider benefits are not always immediately visible to the specific locality in which the project is sited. However, the benefits to society and the wider economy as a whole are significant and this must be reflected in the weight given to these considerations by decision makers in reaching their decisions.

(Our emphasis)

And then there's this bit, which should be read by all Parish Councillors - especially those who ought to be hanging their heads in shame:

PPS22 makes clear that regional planning bodies and local authorities should not make assumptions about the technical and commercial feasibility of renewable energy projects, and that possible locations for renewable energy development must not be ruled out as unsuitable in advance of full consideration of the application and its likely impacts ...

What else did the raging nimbies of Church Lench Parish Council and its Anti-Windfarm Working Party do, but make assumptions about the technical and commercial feasibility of the proposed Lenchwick Windfarm and endeavour to rule out the location before they'd even seen the planning application? This was precisely what the original Parish Council was determined to avoid doing - which is why they had to be bullied into resigning, so that they could be replaced by people who had VVASP placards and stickers plastered all over their property.

So ... 'crucial national benefits' ... 'benefits shared by all communities' ... 'benefits to society and the wider economy' ... the very things that VVASP and its pet Parish Councillors committed themselves to opposing.

Maybe it's the idea of 'benefits' that they just can't stand.

STROUD SUPPORTS WINDFARM!!

If ever there was a headline guaranteed to cause apoplexy among the membership of VVASP, it must be that one!

However, it actually relates to an NOP opinion poll. Residents near Stroud in Gloucestershire were invited to express their opinions about a proposed windfarm for Berkeley Vale. The results are very interesting indeed - you can find them here:

http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/news/stroud-supports-berkeley-vale-wind-park-shows-nop-poll

Of course, the Lenchwick area has never properly been polled. We know that three Parish Councils surveyed their residents in March 2009. This led to accusations from VVASP at the time that the Parish Councils hadn't given the protest group enough chance to misinform the public about windfarms (four months of evil propaganda clearly wasn't sufficient, in VVASP's warped view, to mislead the community). VVASP very quickly managed to dispose of one of the Parish Councils concerned and attempted to get rid of one of the others, too.

But the polls revealed that the majority of local residents weren't opposed to the plans - many of them couldn't be bothered to respond. That gave VVASP the opportunity to disenfranchise a substantial number of local residents and grossly to misrepresent the outcome. According to VVASP, 82% of Church Lench parish was against the windfarm. According to mathematics, just 57% of households expressed opposition.

Even more amazing, in Harvington - where the Parish Council instantly set itself up as a manic nimby group - a mere 31% of household raised their voices against. That's right - 31%! So, of course, their parish councillors threw public money at VVASP, because democracy means nothing, does it?

Anyway, what the opinion poll in the Stroud area reveals is what is repeated in polls nationally. The majority of people support windfarms.

And as the link above indicates, a crazed minority make all the fuss against them. Some local councillors fall into the trap of assuming that the noisy nimbies represent the majority. In that way, the demented opponents of wind power hold the UK back and cost us all a great deal of money.

Let us hope that the councillors of Wychavon have the wisdom and common sense to recognise that VVASP represent only themselves - and that the majority, around Lenchwick as elsewhere, supports wind energy, but tends to do so rather quietly.

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

It's like buses. You wait months for a response from ScottishPower Renewables, and then four come along at once.

A quick glance at the Wychavon District Council website reveals that, on the very last day of 2010, a series of documents were uploaded. These include SPR's response to the submission from Parkinson Wright solicitors (submitted on behalf of the manic nimbies of Church Lench and paid for by everybody else, as usual), SPR's response to the DTA report on Landscape and Visual Amenity, SPR's response to the MAS Environmental "report" (i.e., total guff) on Noise and SPR's response to Captain Nookie of the good ship VVASP.

These make for excellent reading. The consultants charged with rebutting the reports commissioned by Wychavon District Council on the visual and noise aspects of the windfarm planning application take a sober and detailed approach. The one which refutes the rather wild and aimless claims made by MAS Environmental (Noise Experts By Appointment to Nimbyland) does a brilliant job of pointing out the flaws in the report. There is evidence aplenty to suggest that Wychavon only hired MAS Environmental after a sustained campaign of nonsense from our old friends of the nimby Politburo, and VVASP made a great big splash out of the illogical and unsupported comments offered by the "experts". You can bet that they won't make much of a noise about the fact that the claims made by those "experts" have been effectively rubbished by the consultants working for ScottishPower Renewables.

(One point which keeps cropping up is that SPR's noise consultants consistently took a "worst-case" approach, which MAS Environmental repeatedly criticised on bizarre grounds. How odd.)

The report on Landscape and Visual Amenity, commissioned by the District Council, is also slammed for wandering off its remit. Makes you wonder whether the nimby brigade also insisted on those consultants being retained (at public expense) by the council. Anyway, it matters little. These "experts" do like to have their two-penn'orth and pass comments on things that don't concern them.

More exciting still are SPR's responses to VVASP and the solicitor hired by VVASP's friends and neighbours in the Parish Council-funded Stop-the-Windfarm Working Party. Both responses robustly attack the misapprehensions and mistakes with which both Big Chief Nookie and the solicitor acting for Church Lench Nimby Inc. liberally scattered their woeful submissions.

The timing, however, is interesting. VVASP have little time to get their nasty propaganda machine working against these measured responses. Their own submissions have been dismissed as worthless, the consultants they tricked Wychavon into hiring have been found wanting, their full-page ad campaigns, it turns out, were based on pretty hopeless reports. Far be it from VVASP to publicise the full story (remember their mission statement: 'Providing Extremely Selective Information to Help the Community Make a Misinformed Decision'), so they won't make much of the fact that their arguments have collapsed like a failed souffle. Similarly, they made very little of the fact that the Church Lench Noise Measurement Group's noise survey revealed only that the planning application submitted by ScottishPower Renewables had been telling the truth.

But they will struggle to bombard all and sundry with dogmatic attacks on the science and planning laws with which SPR and its consultants have slammed the various reports sponsored, one way or another, by Dr No and his irresponsible cronies.

On 27 January, the Development Control Committee at Wychavon will meet to consider the Lenchwick Windfarm planning application. Thirty minutes will be allocated to each side of the "debate".

Two days before that, the councillors will be taken on a site visit to view the location of the proposed windfarm from a variety of angles. Expect much merriment. Vale Villages Amateur Society of Players (VVASP) will stage a re-enactment of George Romero's Day of the Dead, with the zombies played - very convincingly, we understand - by a smattering of brainwashed dupes. All those spare VVASP placards that are still lying around will magically appear in inappropriate places (because the VVASP membership genuinely believe that they own EVERYTHING - they'd paint the sky yellow, with a great big NO in the middle, if they could only figure out how to do it). With luck, not one single Wychavon councillor will be fooled by the latest display of nimby foolishness.

In a promising move, the Wychavon planning officer has invited our (real) friends at BLoW to submit a page to be included in his report to the planning committee. How good is that?

But, with all thise activity looming, will VVASP be able to spread their predictably dishonest garbage in response to the sensible responses from SPR in time? Or will they just concentrate on rehearsing their zombies?

We'll do our best to keep you posted.

Oh, and happy New Year, everyone!