Where skylarks dare

Up on Adam Twine’s farm, five turbines spell out his commitment– to community-owned renewables. Yes, there’s a cost, in rural charm… but just look at the (human) energy potential.

Adam Twine isn’t sure he likes the look of giant wind turbines. Which is somewhat strange, coming from a man who has spent 15 years battling to put five of them up on his Oxfordshire farm.

Earlier this summer, as we drove in his battered blue Volvo diesel estate along the furrows of the lush green field, the 46-year-old organic farmer cut the engine and asked if I could hear the skylarks.

“Sometimes I just lie in the grass and listen to them,” he said.

The peace was shattered in August, with the arrival of construction lorries to dig up the 500-acre field and install five 1.3MW Siemens wind turbines. He does expect the skylarks to return once the lorries have moved out, and his cows to graze peaceably up to the base of the turbines, but he concedes this will no longer be a rural scene.

“There’s a compromise when you put industrial machines in a country landscape,” he says, as we sit in the garden of the 250-year-old farmhouse he shares with his partner Liz and two teenage children. “But it’s a question of what is an acceptable compromise and what is not. Wind is a fraction of the environmental cost of any other technology.”

What’s more, he adds, “you’re paying the environmental cost of the electricity in the visual impact. It’s not being left for future generations. All the cost is being borne by the people who are using the electricity. It’s not being borne by people living thousands of miles away.” There’s an obvious contrast with Didcot power station, which we can see from his field some 25 miles to the north, burning coal brought in from as far away as South Africa.

Which is why it is so important to Twine that his Westmill Wind Farm Co-operative is community owned. He raised an unprecedented £4.4 million from 2,000 investors, half of them living within a 25-kilometre radius of the farm. Each stumped up a minimum of £250.

"Westmill isn’t just another wind farm; it’s a principle that local people can get together and generate their own power"

“Westmill isn’t just another wind farm,” he says. “It’s a principle that local people can get together and generate their own power.” The ownership model was pioneered in this country by Baywind in Cumbria [see 'Th­e future is disruptive'], and Westmill is managed in association with Baywind’s outreach operation, Energy4all.

Twine, whose greenie credentials stretch back to the anti-nuclear campaigns of the 1970s, has been shortlisted for a prestigious Schumacher Award for his achievement, but the ride has been as bumpy as the ride across the field in his Volvo. “It’s been a roller coaster,” he says. Years of planning tussles finally ended in 2005 after Formula One driver Paddy McNally, owner of a £7 million estate across the road, was knocked back in his attempt to get the High Court to overturn planning permission.

Then, just before the close of the share offer in February 2006, Twine’s plans were almost blown off course by the harsh winds of the global marketplace. The German company Siemens bought out the Danish turbine manufacturer company Westmill had been dealing with. Negotiations over Twine’s turbines had to begin again, and supply shortages caused further delays. Siemens eventually said he could have them – but the price had gone up by 30%.

This spring, Twine had to go back to the 2,000 Westmill members and reopen the co-op to 100 new members in a bid to stump up another £850,000. Miss the narrow window of opportunity to place the order and the project would have to be scrapped, he said.

"Here were 200 people with this strong desire for the project to succeed. That’s how social change happens"

It was a nail-biting time, but when he told members about the co-op’s predicament at the annual general meeting, they were quick to rally behind him. “It occurred to me that a few years ago there was just the two of us, then during the campaigning it was 20 people sitting around the kitchen table. Now here were, 200 people in an Oxford University lecture theatre with this strong desire for the project to succeed,” he said. “That’s how social change happens.”

Twine read Agriculture at Reading University – “by default”, he says – but had no intention of taking over the family farm, part of which is leased from the National Trust. He expected to go off to do VSO work, like many of his friends, and that his life would take a different turn. But his father died in 1984, just after he graduated from college, and, with his only sibling in South Africa, he faced the choice of taking up the tenancy or his family losing the farm where he had grown up.

“To have turned it down would have meant waving goodbye to the opportunity to use it to bring about change,” he said.

With the wind farm finally resolved, Twine has been able to get back to managing the 300-head herd of dairy and beef cattle and his crops of organic cereals and pulses.

But Westmill has always been more than just a farm: Twine has a green burial service, as well as renting out space to various businesses, including an organic food box scheme, a horticultural therapy charity, and a biodiesel plant converting chip fat into diesel.

His farm has hosted Big Green Gatherings, a peace camp and a renewable energy festival, and every year he has camps for groups ranging from inner city kids and boy scouts to Druids, who pitch their tents to celebrate solstices and equinoxes.

Twine obviously relishes the fact that Westmill is something of a green Noah’s ark bobbing around in the shadows of Didcot power station. Now that another 2,000 people are on board through the co-op, he expects it to sail into new uncharted waters.

“At the AGM there was a guy who was setting up a social wind farm in India. We think there may be a link there in the future,” said Twine. “That’s the exciting thing about a co-op. It’s the energy that informed the Rochdale Pioneers. Things can happen when you have that energy behind you.”

Terry Slavin is a regular writer for The Observer, specialising in environmental issues

21 September 2007

Terry Slavin