by Rene Lavanchy
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband was forced to defend his green energy policy in the face of angry protests from a coalition of campaigners this week as Britain’s only wind turbine plant prepared to close.
The Vestas Blades factory on the Isle of Wight is expected to close today (Friday) with the loss of 625 jobs as the Danish firm moves production to the United States. A sit-in by factory workers, in defiance of legal action by Vestas, was continuing as Tribune went to press.
Mr Miliband was confronted by eco-activists, trade union shop stewards and workers from the plant who “hijacked” his public meetings in Oxford on Monday.
Sophie Lewis, a student member of pressure group Workers’ Climate Action, said: “Everyone in the audience was asking questions about the Vestas plant when they weren’t supposed to. They were asking why Miliband won’t be brave and show some leadership at this time. People were pointing out the government doesn’t seem to have a problem running roughshod over nimbyism when there’s capitalism behind it, like a runway.
“The reason so many people turned up was clearly the Vestas campaign. The whole thing got hijacked by Vestas.”
Mr Miliband rejected suggestions from protesters that the factory should be nationalised, saying it would discourage other turbine makers such as Mitsubishi from setting up factories in Britain.
The Vestas plant at Newport makes turbine blades for the US market, but the company says it has been discouraged from making blades for British wind farms by planning restrictions which have prevented most wind farms from being built.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change this week announced it was offering Vestas a £6m grant to build a research and development facility that it says could employ 150 people. But the funding, which has yet to be confirmed, will not affect Vestas’ decision to shut the factory.
Ms Lewis commented: “The R&D facility is of no use to the 600 green-collar jobs that have been thrown on the scrapheap.”
In a response to protest messages sent to his e-mail address, Mr Miliband said: “Vestas have repeatedly told us that offers of government subsidy were not the issue for them. The factory makes a different sized blade to the ones used in Britain, so each one it makes is shipped to the US. They wanted to have their production in America to cut some of that journey.
“Their biggest difficulty is with planning objections to onshore wind turbines, which have slowed down the growth in the UK market. That is why we are reforming the planning rules and are arguing strongly that people need to see climate change as a bigger threat to the countryside than the wind turbine.”
