Stand in the centre of the market town of Swaffham, Norfolk, on a bright, clear day and cast your eyes upwards - above the bric a brac market with its wooden boxes of rusty garden tools, above the tiled roofs of shops and pubs, beyond the neo-classical cupola topped by a statue of a portly figurine representing some ancient goddess. What is it? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, what you're looking at are the steadily turning white fibreglass blades of a very large electricity generating wind turbine. As the blades rotate you can just see the glass windows of a viewing platform set just below the top of the tall, tapered tower. Some small shadowy figures are standing inside, looking back down to earth.
The fact that such a tall structure - about the same height as Norwich Cathedral - should have been built so close to the centre of an English country town might in itself seem extraordinary. But this also happens to be the largest wind turbine so far built anywhere in Britain.
So did the anticipated arrival of this major new landmark get the residents of Swaffham up in arms? Well, there were some objections, including one from the local chamber of trade, but these were the exception. Swaffham's local council approved its construction with virtually no dissent. And not only that, the councillors have now said that they want another one as well. Talk to people in the market square and you get no sense that they consider this to be an alien intrusion.
The benefits are obvious. The turbine stands next to an EcoCentre which has generated jobs and business in the area. It's a tourist attraction - visitors can climb up the tower's 300 stairs and enjoy a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. And the turbine has generally been viewed as an excellent way of showing that Swaffham, a town which like other rural areas has suffered its own share of economic decline, can move with the times. When the second turbine is built the town will be able to say proudly that all the electricity its residents use is produced by a clean, non-polluting source.
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But Swaffham is also an exception. The sad fact is that objections to the siting of wind turbines on visual grounds have revealed a deeply conservative vein in the British psyche. Time and again the "leave it as it's been for a hundred years" brigade, especially the sub-section of that brigade who have moved into the countryside to discover their "rural idyll", have effectively scuppered plans for wind turbines time and time again. I enjoy the British countryside as much as anyone - I live in it, on the edge of the Quantock Hills in Somerset - but that is no reason why attractive, elegant, aerodynamic wind turbines, producing clean electricity, should not be as much a part of the rural economy as battery chicken units or food processing plants. Since Britain is the windiest country in Europe, it's a scandal that we aren't making better use of one of our greatest natural resources.
Ad that's only the start. If we're serious about combating climate change, we need to look beyond the fossil fuel horizon to a future where we don't have to plunder the Alaskan wastes for our fuel, where we don't risk a radioactive disaster, and where we can start to rely on fuel sources which won't suddenly run out and leave us high and dry.
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Let's clear away some other myths as well.
"Wind turbines are noisy". They're not. Some of the earlier models did make unpleasant sounds which could be heard some distance away. But all the machines developed in the past ten years or so have sound-proofing to ensure that very little sound escapes from their generators and gearboxes. There are also strict rules which ensure that no turbine is positioned so close to a house that the noise is unacceptable by modern health and safety standards.
"Wind turbines are inefficient". Obviously they don't work when the wind doesn't blow, but their electricity simply flows into the grid when it is being produced and then mixes with the 'juice' coming out from all the other types of power stations. There is no problem about large numbers of wind turbines feeding their power into the grid when the wind starts to blow - the system can cope with it. To give some idea of what wind power can do when it's taken seriously, Denmark now gets 14% of its electricity from wind energy.
"Wind turbines kill birds". Like the noise argument, this is a an assumption based on some bad experience in the United States and the south of Spain, where some large birds of prey have flown into wind turbine blades. This is not the general experience. In the dozen or so European countries where wind power is developing fast, problems with birds flying into turbines have been minimal. In most cases birds quickly learn to adapt their flight pattern to avoid a new structure - just as they learned to fly round pylons. The number of birds killed by wind turbines each year is dwarfed by the numbers killed on roads by the internal combustion engine.
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Myths apart, the crazy thing is that the UK is missing out on a booming international business. For the last four years, the international wind power market has been expanding at a rate of about 30% each year. It's now worth an annual $4 billion. Wind energy is the fastest growing energy sources of all, with a worldwide capacity at the end of 2000 of about 18,000 Megawatts, enough to produce 37 billion units of electricity in a year.
In Germany, the world leader in wind energy, there are now enough wind turbines to produce enough power for 5% of the country's needs. May not sound much put like that, but remember that this is the biggest nation in Europe, with a population of more than 80 million.
One reason why Germany has done so well with wind power is that the government is committed to a green energy policy. In a country that isn't nearly as windy as Britain, the government has made it attractive for ordinary people - farmers, small businesses, people with £1,000 or so to set aside - to invest in wind energy and receive a good return. The result is that groups of wind energy enthusiasts are putting up wind turbines in small and large clusters in communities all over Germany. And the amount of public money which has been used to support this clean source of power is still peanuts compared with what has been thrown at nuclear and coal (Germany's main existing sources of fuel for electricity) in the past.
If anybody reading this article feels fired up enough to do something positive about wind energy in Britain, then these are a couple of suggestions. You could look at the British Wind Energy Association website (www.bwea.com) to get a better picture of what wind energy is all about and how it works. Then you could go and look at a wind farm - you can find a list on the BWEA site - to see for yourself what all the fuss is about. And if you're really keen, you could find out about investing in one of the wind energy companies in this country which does allow outside investors. The Baywind Energy Co-operative (www.baywind.co.uk), based in Cumbria, has an existing project and ongoing plans to invest in more wind turbines. The return for shareholders in Baywind's current scheme was almost 8% last year - not bad for an energy source still vilified as unpredictable and unreliable.
