Rhondda location revealed for Welsh Government wind farm
Anthony Lewis, Local Democracy Reporter
The location of one of three new windfarms planned by the Welsh Government, which has the potential to power almost 100,000 homes, has been revealed.
Carreg Wen in Rhondda Cynon Taf is the location for one of the three new wind farms – with the others set to be placed in Carmarthenshire and Denbighshire/Conwy.
At Carreg Wen, 18 wind turbines are proposed, with the electricity generated being the equivalent needed for 96,000 homes.
Officials have also said that grid connections are possible at the site in RCT.
We went to speak to residents in Maerdy in the Rhondda Fach and Cwmaman in the Cynon Valley, two places which are close to where the turbines are planned to be built, to get their reactions to the plans.
Ernie Travers, from Maerdy, said: “I wouldn’t like it. It’s a bit close isn’t it?”
He added: “They just turn up and they think they can do it. It could be in some less intrusive place.”
He said they wanted to put solar farms where he used to live and it took a lot of hard work to stop that.
He also said that no-one mentioned the non-green power needed to manufacture things like wind turbines and solar panels.
And he said you could hear a buzz when you were near them, saying: “They do make a noise.”
Cheaper bills hope
Colin Marsh, from Maerdy, said: “We’ve got to have power haven’t we? It’s hard to please everybody. We have got to have power from somewhere.”
But he said it should not be too near to people’s houses.
“A lot of people I know don’t like them. Wherever you look there is a windmill.”
He said one or two didn’t look too bad, but when he was walking up to Llanwonno a few years ago he thought, “how many have they put up?”
He said: “It was like a forest of them up there.”
But he also raised the prospect of cheaper energy bills for the community.
He said: “They know how much they are sending to the national grid” and that they could knock a couple of pounds of people’s bills in RCT.
Pauline Thomas, from Maerdy, said: “If the local community can have money from it, fair enough. Like we have done for the last few years.
“If we have that money, if we benefit from it who are we to moan?”
“Eyesore on the landscape”
Gayle Griffiths, from Maerdy, said: “They are ugly. There is enough of them up there now. They are an eyesore on the landscape.”
She said they gave to local charities now and again but that normal people didn’t get a reduction in their energy bills.
But Terry Hartnoll, of Cwmaman, was very much in favour of wind farms and stressed the benefits of cheap electricity.
He said: “I’m all in favour of it. I like my electricity cheap. I know what hurts the world and I know what is good for it.”
He said they were going to have to keep nuclear power for days when there was no wind and when it was dark and as a mountain biker he said there seemed to be more turbines up there everytime he went up.
He said: “How can you be negative about it unless it is on your doorstep?” We’ve got to have it.”
Allan Jones, also from Cwmaman, said: “I have nothing against it if it leads to cheaper, greener energy.”
“It’s cleaner, more economical. I am all for it. I don’t see why people are moaning and groaning. I don’t see any problem.”
“If they are in your back garden you can complain but not on top of the mountain.”
Trydan Gwyrdd Cymru
Trydan Gwyrdd Cymru intends to create 650 construction jobs through the project with the three new wind farms having the potential to generate enough electricity to power 350,000 Welsh homes’ annual average electricity needs.
Constructing the sites will cost around £500m and in total 67, 6MW wind turbines will be built across the three sites, if approved, with the turbines expected to be around 200m tall.
Trydan Gwyrdd Cymru, which is wholly owned by the Welsh Government, aims to develop 1GW of new renewable energy generation capacity on Welsh public land by 2040.
The wind farms will be built on the Welsh Government’s woodland estate and the Welsh Government’s plan is to generate enough renewable electricity to meet 70% of what’s used in Wales by 2030, rising to 100% by 2035.
The plan is for consultation events to take place before planning permission is submitted by mid-2027.
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Important to understand this landscape. Upland peat plateau with areas of reclaimed coal tips. The existing Pen-y-cymoedd wind farm has already punctured the peat, led to the felling of a million trees and change in demand placed on reclamation culverts. The resulting surge flow of the catchment causing recent downstream flooding. This is an extension of existing turbines at the top of the Fawr, now proposed at the top of the Fach. Rhondda people don’t get cheaper electricity.
Please don’t apply factual information , it will only confuse Welsh Government whom will have already decided to proceed . Exactly like Drakeford being interviewed when he became First Disaster , on the M4 bypass , you could tell he had decided and the rest WILL follow , it wasn’t going to happen , despite the 11 million pound enquiry , which if you had attended you realised was laughable .
Every beautiful vista in Wales is now now bristling with wind farms. The places where you can go to have a beautiful sea view are fast disappearing, you will soon be looking out at wind farms. Our beautiful countryside is being filled with solar farms and the pylons needed to take the power to England. Unfortunately we put the profits of companies outside of Wales before the people and beautiful landscapes of Wales. The production an erection of a wind turbine produces more CO2 than it saves in it’s lifetime. I am very much in favour of green power but… Read more »
I don’t understand why wind turbines can not be set up around industrial and business areas like they have partly done in Newport and Cardiff.
Hopefully there’ll be more in the Vale of Glamorgan, there are some great locations near the coast, ideal for wind turbines.
Coastal sites are also more efficient because a wind turbine needs a steady uninterrupted flow with no buffeting or gusting caused by mountains. This efficiency is best displayed in the chosen sites of Scandinavia, Netherland and Germany. The siting of wind turbines in Britain is driven by government policy. Westminster says “stick them in Wales” and the Welsh government says “Tan8 stick them on the hills”. Wrong and wrong.
Not enough suitable wind. As you can tell, they can and do where it’s actually feasible but it rarely is. Either on top of a mountain or out to sea and someone always complains no matter what you do. As for WilliamsG idea that the production and erection of a wind turbine produces more CO2 than it saves in its lifetime, this is false and based on a Reform myth that they only last for 5 years. The life time is actually something like 25 years. With that said all studies show that a typical wind turbine off sets its… Read more »
Do the developers care about Cymru’s beauty? I don’t think so. All they see is the beauty of all that lovely lolly.
I don’t have a problem with turbines generally. Rather graceful in my mind. And I rather doubt the Co2 bit as a gotcha in the grand scheme of things.
You could have Drax as a landscape enhancement, Hinkley perhaps.
They are so pretty and enhance the landscape……not!!
Name a more attractive method of power generation.
Hydro
If the mountain tops of the valleys become covered in wind turbines, appearing like giant barbed wire, it may affect peoples’ mental health
Go on then, how?
Magical wind turbine EM radiation? (This is a joke)
Somewhere someone will believe that though.
It does spoil the beauty of a mountain. If it makes a person unhappy then it will affect their mental health. It makes more sense to place wind turbines and solar panels on industrial and business parks. These are already bricked and concreted areas.
Disagree.
Solar for industrial and turbines, defo no problem, look at Bristol port. But wind flow over the land, use it where best.
Wind flow around the Rumney, Cardiff wind turbine looks pretty good.
You may or may not be aware Jeff, we are all different. People have different perspectives on what affects their mental health. Living in the valleys as I do, if I looked up to the top of the mountains and all I saw was wind turbines it may affect my mental health.
And then it affects my health when I see that we are still chasing fossil fuels. Swings and roundabouts.
I’m in favour of wind turbines but not along the valley mountain tops where people can see them from their homes.
Good idea, put them in disused mine shafts where we cannot see them
I’m also someone who lives in the area and I have zero problem with the turbines. It’s much better than say having a coal mine next door as they do over in Merthyr. The valleys have been producing energy for decades and most of the mountains are barely even real mountains but old coal tips that have been reclaimed at this point. The valley have been shaped by mining, strip mining, tunnels, you name it. The mountains have long been stripped of the majority of the natural forests to be replaced with coniferous plantations. The country also needs energy so… Read more »
Wales is a net exporter of electricity. We produce more than we need. Solar and wind can be placed on bricked and concreted areas. We have enough dams that could be retrofitted for hydroelectric power.
Guess who gets the profits, yeah not Wales this is for England’s benefit again. People need to protest these.
They are not even an efficient way to produce power and they don’t last that long… Not to mention. The horrible scar they leave on our environment.
Trydan Gwyrdd Cymru is wholly owned by Welsh Government.
If these go ahead, as I’m sure they will, given that it will be Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Evans MS who has to grant consent to her government, at least the benefits are planned to stay in Wales, but we shall have to see if that actually happens in practice It will be interesting to see how the government justifies having a connection to the grid on poles, given that it is their own policy to underground grid connections. And I hope there is no peat on the site as they also have a policy not to develop such land I would… Read more »
I get that turbines are not everyone’s cup of tea, but they and solar are the cheapest, quickest and least carbon intensive way of producing electricity currently.
Also if we ever find a better way of producing energy (cold fusion, microwave or whatever) then wind and solar are much easier to dismantle and remove than anything else out there we currently use.
Aberthaw decommissioning is going to cost millions and so is Ffos y Fran where they got their coal from. Now that’s a much bigger “blot on the landscape”…
Ffos y Fran prior to opencast mining was a itself a coal tip and iron s**g waste. It hasn’t been green of landscape since the days of the ironmasters.
These look fine in moderation but there needs to be some local benefit otherwise it’s just another story of resource extraction.
I don’t know what the numbers would be , but we have a falling bird population and these surely add a substantial additional threat .