As GWT’s planning officer, I’m all too aware that it’s very easy to become absorbed into the arcane world of the Welsh planning system. Having to be familiar with a veritable spaghetti soup of acronyms; *TANs, PPW, NDF, SPG, BNB. LDPs and the like means one can get too close to the technical minutiae of the profession. At times we at GWT get the feeling that nature in Gwent is assailed from all sides by development proposals, from roads and business parks to energy projects on the rest. As I dash from one objection letter to the next, I sometimes need to remind myself of what we are actually fighting for. The beauty, complexity and fragility of our Gwent wildlife is something we must never take for granted, and the wave of gigantic power stations threatening the Gwent Levels SSSI is a case in point.
The seemingly unstoppable march of these behemoths across our Levels landscape serves to remind us of the reality of threats Gwent’s wildlife faces, and this is why we have launched a campaign to call on the Senedd to call a halt to new development on the SSSI. Many have joined our call, including many of the environmental charities - both Gwent-based and nationally, as have several of the Levels’ community councils (parish councils).
The developers claim that they can build these power stations without damaging the wildlife of the Levels, but how? How can hundreds of thousands of plexiglass panels mounted on steel frames, pile-driven into the wetland SSSI and historic landscape be, by any stretch of the imagination, non-damaging, let alone constitute a biodiversity net gain? The miles of underground cabling dug into our fragile wetlands, the kilometres of fencing, the lighting, the thousands of miles of maintenance vehicle trips tracking across the Levels habitat, the thousands of tonnes of concrete poured, the plastic, the battery storage compounds the size of articulated lorries, the oil, the noise, the dust, the vibration ….. how can this be acceptable in these times of a Nature Emergency in Wales ?
