OPPONENTS of a proposal to build wind turbines in the Den Brook Valley say they will continue their fight after the company behind the application announced last week it is now looking to build turbines which are 120 metres high. Renewable Energy Systems (RES) originally suggested it would seek to build ten 100m high turbines at the site, but now they want to build nine 120m high turbines. North Tawton Town Council had an open forum last Tuesday where members of the Den Brook Valley Action Group, set up to oppose the scheme, addressed councillors. John Shields, who has farmed at De Bathe Farm for more than 20 years, used the opportunity to challenged RES to release the figures from the anemometer it has located near the site for more than 12 months. He said if the scheme was as good as the developers claimed, why had they not made the wind speed figures which the device had recorded available to local people? RES says the 18mw project could generate electricity equivalent to the needs of between 10,000 and 13,000 homes a year, but the action group believes the actual figure is closer to 5,000, based on research undertaken at nearby North Wyke. Mr Shields told councillors the Government was only interested in meeting its Kyoto target of 10% of energy from renewable sources by 2010, rather than looking at all the options. ?Current Government policy is to cover Devon with wind farms which will produce a disastrous waste of money and needlessly ruin the countryside.? Mr Shields said there were other more efficient forms of renewable energy than wind power: ?Regen SW say wave power could be available within three years and could create 700 jobs by 2020 and a £27-million benefit to the economy in the South West. ?We need to look at other ways of reducing carbon emissions, such as turning off electrical equipment such as televisions left on standby and encouraging people to do more car-sharing. ?The economy is bound to suffer. Tourism is increasingly important to the area. Who is likely to want to come and stay in the vicinity of a windfarm?? Resident Sheila Quick told members she felt more attention should be paid to the health, noise and safety effect of living close to turbines. Responding to Mr Shields? challenge, Rachel Ruffle, of RES, said the company did not publish wind speed data as it was ?commercially sensitive and on its own was open to misinterpretation?. She added: ?In fact, the data that we use to make a 20-year prediction is partly from site but correlated with a long term data set from a Met Office station so that we can account for year on year variations in order to get a 20-year prediction. ?We also use models to predict localised effects to account for differences between the turbine locations and the Met mast location.? She said wave power was an ?emerging technology? and one that renewable energy companies were already looking into. There was ?no evidence? to support claims that wind turbines create low frequency noise that can affect health. She quoted Dr Geoff Leventhall, consultant in noise vibration and acoustics and a leading expert in low frequency noise, who recently concluded that: ?There is no significant infrasound from current designs of wind turbines. ?To say that there is an infrasound problem is one of the hares which objectors to wind farms like to run. There will not be any effects from infrasound from the turbines.?
