"Older people blocking wind power for future generations" is the headline of a new piece of research.
The survey of 500 people suggested that the over 55s are much more likely to oppose windfarms – only six out of 10 support them, compared with 86% of 16-34 year olds, and no under-24s objected.
The company that commissioned the phone poll, IPB Communications, hypothesises that older people are more likely to have time to spend opposing planning requests, which explains why they are the effective army behind the high and rising rate at which such plans are rejected.
"It's not about attacking older people, it's about motivating young people to get engaged in the planning process," said John Quinton-Barber, a senior consultant at IPB (who perhaps didn't have approval of the headline above).
There are the obvious concerns about a phone poll of 1,000 people, in which half agreed to answer the questions.
Foremost is that when divided into six age groups the percentage differences equal pretty small numbers of people (who already had to be willing to answer a phone survey), though when divided between even more categories by region the results were fairly uniformly 75% in favour (also the pretty equal split between the sexes).
There are interesting questions that were not asked too. Perhaps most pertinently: to what extent are the results also skewed by the fact that older people are more likely to live in the rural areas where windfarms will be built, and might spoil the view. As David MacKay points out in his long-titled but very readable book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air: "People love renewable energy, unless it is bigger than a fig-leaf" – especially when it's on their doorstep.
And when people were asked why they objected, the list of possible responses appears not to have included what many might feel – rightly or wrongly – that wind turbines in general, or at least in a particular location, might be an ineffective and expensive way to generate clean energy. Interestingly, the older age categories were more likely to answer "other" to this question.
Given wind power is seen as such a vital part of the UK's ambitious targets for renewable energy in the next decade or so, and the increasingly tough job investors are having persuading anybody to let them build them, it is a serious issue that needs to be better understood.
Helpfully IPB have offered to put the full results from pollsters NEMS market research on their website as soon as possible.
