COMMENT
Business Buzz
with Harry Pearson
WELL BLOW ME DOWN – THE FUTURE ’ S HERE AT LAST !
Elsewhere in this issue you can read about the LM Wind Power factory that will be building 107-metre-long turbine blades for the Haliade-X wind platform at Dogger Bank , a massive facility that will generate enough electricity to power six million homes ( or 5,999,999 if my daughter has left all the bloody lights on again ).
I am very excited about this news because , aside from the jobs it will create , it also fulfils some of my childhood dreams . I grew up in an era when we all firmly believed in the future , and that future was white , smooth and eerily silent . A bit like the space between Alan Shearer ’ s ears .
In many ways , wind turbines are the most modernlooking structures in the country these days : the one thing that materialised from amid the suspended mono-rails ( in the 1960s when my dad was working at Dorman Long he designed a monorail for … Scarborough Council ), hover scooters and diets of pills prepared for us by gliding robot servants that were staples of Look and Learn , Tell Me Why and The Eagle comic ’ s “ The World of the Future ” features back when the word retro hadn ’ t yet been invented .
As it turns out , wind turbines are not actually that modern . When George Stephenson and the Steam Age put a halt to the practice of harnessing the wind to power machinery in Britain and most of the rest of the world , in Denmark they remained faithful to the energy-generating windmill .
During the Victorian era , the Danes marched against the tide , continuing to train “ wind electricians ” and “ wind prospectors ”, men whose job it was to travel around the countryside with huge spruce poles they could climb up to test for areas where the raw resource of breeze was at its most abundant .
As early as 1895 , the Danes were using windmills to
produce electricity to light schools and villages . Over a century later , the UK – officially the windiest place in Europe ( you can insert your own curry joke here if you like ) – started to come round to the Danish way of thinking .
The first turbine locked into our national grid was erected in the Orkney Islands way back in 1951 . The first wind farm proper was built at Delabole , Cornwall , 40 years after that . There are now 2,450 wind farms in Great Britain , running 10,961 operational turbines . In clusters ranging in size from a handful to hundreds , they generate 25 per cent of the UK ’ s electricity .
Some people , including my mum , think there is something distinctly unnerving about the quietness of wind turbines . The human mind demands that a machine so big should make a similarly massive racket .
Maybe that ’ s why conspiracy theorists ( including my next-door neighbour ) are convinced that wind turbines generate low-frequency sounds which , via some harmonic quirk , can be amplified by the exterior structure of certain homes into an infiltrating and persistent hum that will drive humanity mad , or into the arms of Bill Gates and his lizard overlords , which is likely worse .
Since my next-door neighbour also believes that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by an MI5-selected lookalike (“ It ’ s why The Beatles never played live ever again . You see , he was taller than the real Paul . And his ears are different . It ’ s been proved by scientists ”) I think we can discount all his ideas . Still , there is definitely something strangely sci-fi about the giant , slowly rotating blades of the wind turbine . They are the future we were promised . And that future is going to be built here on Teesside .
Harry Pearson ’ s latest book The Farther Corner – A Sentimental Return to North-East Football is out now .
The voice of business in the Tees region | 115