The Moy Valley Protection group which represents the concerns of many communities in Mayo will present a letter to An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny’s office and to the elected members of Mayo County Council in Castlebar today (Monday ) at 5pm.
The group is calling for an immediate moratorium on industrial and cluster wind farms and the planned pylon and high voltage connections that they necessitate. According to a statement from the group, the letter will give real life stories of the anxiety being caused to families who have children with epilepsy, albinoism, and special needs, and will also refer to young couples and farmers who have spent their savings and borrowed to improve their farms and homesteads, only to discover they will be in the middle of a jobless, heavy metal, industrial zone that did not have to go through the planning hurdles they had to protect visual amenities and blend in with the environment and landscape.
The group believes the independent commission on undergrounding is an irrelevancy, as it has not been tasked with providing a fully independent analysis of the feasibility of an additional grid that will be necessitated by an excessive plan for industrial wind farms that provide unreliable, costly, and intermittent electricity, yet still need back up conventional power generation plant and barely dent our carbon fuel emissions.
The group wants the national and county renewable energy plan scrapped and is calling for an independent cost benefit analysis of GRID 25, including GridWest, and their inter-linked wind farms which are all inseparable.
The statement continued that the cost of the unnecessary developments is adding €400 to the average electricity bill and, like the proposed water charges, will make it impossible for hard pressed families to make ends meet. The group also believes the devaluation of land and property and the attack on the tourist industry's greatest asset, our landscape and natural amenities, have not been factored into the projects.
