ESC 9 - The look of wind turbines
Media Isle of Man had the honour of being part of Energy Sustainability Centre's recent 'Roundtable' session, organised by MMC and hosted by Capital International Group.
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00:00Anthony, I'm going to hark back straight, all the way back to the start of the conversation.
00:05You said something really interesting. When you travel on the ferry, you see the turbines,
00:10you don't see them yet, and you're wondering, so why? As a journalist, as an editor of a book in Wales,
00:15where we've had a lot of wind farms, there's been company-wide complaints seeing,
00:20it's almost like, yeah, great, all for making the country our nation,
00:25an environmentally stable nation, I just don't want to have a look at it when I'm looking out onto the beach.
00:32Can you articulate more to what you're thinking, sort of why you think that's important?
00:37I think that, I'm sure we all got on a ferry however many years ago when they first started going up,
00:44and I can't quantify that. I think what's happening, I remember there being a big debate around where the ferry was going to go
00:52and how it was going to get through and so on and so forth.
00:56What you realise today is that the wind farms of the north of the UK are there, they're substantial,
01:05they're actually very geometric, they create a different environment than we had previously.
01:15And I think that as a community, you can't help but get used to it, it is what it is.
01:21And so I think it's a natural extension that we will see more rather than less,
01:29and it's very evident that as an island we don't have anything at the moment,
01:37and I don't think there's anything wrong with creating the right project in Maxwaters.
01:46Whether that extends to being onshore as well as offshore, I'm sure that just elevates the debate even further.
01:52But I think when you look out into the Irish Sea, I don't think it makes any difference
02:00whether you're going away to the UK or coming back to the Isle of Man and there's an offshore wind farm.
02:06That is just the 21st century in which we live in today.
02:10And I think as an individual and as a population, the majority of people have moved on,
02:17and therefore it's not the contentious thing that it probably once was.