BARRY VAUGHAN, of Victoria Road, Dartmouth, writes:

A solution to your difficult article, highlighting the visual impoverishment the modern wind turbine presents in the open countryside, reflects an anguished potpourri of vested intractable interests, which cries out for a 'Soloman's Judgement'.

Before the steam engine was properly developed, there were thousands of windmills dotted about Britain. At that time, One: wind power had two favoured points – they wereneeded; in the context of their day – they were powerful machines.

And two: local people clutching their corn for the Miller, actually used them and thus benefited. This is not so with the modern wind machine. Local people don't get a look in.

The extreme difficulty with governing blades designed for maximum rotational speed, but to run in an unstable, surging prime mover, wind - as compared to water, makes the power generated too wild and damaging to sell for use by others. So that clarifies and annuls the second helpful point about wind power – the first already being ousted by the contributions of coal and oil fuelled machines and the glaringly obvious. Privatisation – taking off all and giving to a few.

I suspect that when it dawns on the general public, that their utility bills are creeping up, more in the support of the ambitions and agenda of others, and not for what they are supposed to be buying, in spite of their own efforts to keep bills down, the millions of pounds now thrown at establishing sufficient wind power capacity to fulfil the political goal of CO2 emission reduction, then people are going to question more severely the steady continuation of wind turbines being stuck in here and there throughout the 'Gardens of the South West'.

How on earth can these two opposing factors be reconciled – wind machines need to be at least 30 foot high to be above the wind gradient and unmanageable gusts, within an open site enjoying an average wind speed of 14 miles per hour – but people do need a rest eventually from the industrial concrete carpeted woodland of poles, pylons and pipes; factory barns and pokey sheds and stinks, where they had to co-exist among, until enough money and time allowed them an escape to sunny Devon, only to be disillusioned by seeing more slave machines to this present unbridled, single minded squandering industrialised nation, popping up a few fields away! Y'know, perhaps we human beings need dedicated National Parks as well as the animals and plants?

The financial establishment will never be satisfied, until the entire planet becomes a 'workplace'! Listen carefully to the way they talk, act and beat their arrogant breasts.