With its medieval church and picturesque village green, the tranquil hamlet of Friston in eastern England should be an unlikely place for a showdown with the UK government and an energy giant.
But Friston, population 341, is on the frontline of a bitter green energy battle between locals in the rural county of Suffolk and those who want to locate a vast energy hub there.
If the plans by National Grid—backed by both the new Labour government and its Conservative predecessor—go ahead, it will see the area transformed by steel and concrete for onshore substations.
Undersea cables from offshore windfarms would make landfall somewhere on the nearby coastline before being sent a few kilometers inland via huge “cable trenches”, requiring years of disruptive construction work.
The government wants to decarbonize electricity supply by 2030. The Suffolk campaigners back that transition to renewables.
They warn, however, that current plans to bring green energy from offshore wind turbines into the grid via the planned infrastructure will be an ecological and tourism “catastrophe”.
Thousands of jobs in Suffolk depend on the year-round visitors who flock to the county’s beaches, coastal resorts and unspoilt countryside.
The area is particularly renowned for its protected birdlife.
Opposition to the plans could certainly appear to be driven by “nimbyism”—the opposition to something being built or done in your local community, even if it has to be done elsewhere.
Suffolk residents are understandably keen to preserve their rural haven.
But the campaigners, who believe offshore infrastructure would both be less destructive and more efficient, argue the issues are far bigger.
‘Laughed at’
“We’ve been laughed at, because they say we’re just nimbys. We’ve been mocked,” said Fiona Gilmore, a former strategic adviser to emerging market countries, who set up the Suffolk Energy Action Solutions (SEAS) campaign group in 2019.
Branding her and other critics of the scheme “nimbys”—or “not in my backyard”—is just a convenient way of dismissing their justifiable concerns for nature and the environment, she added.
Those include the irreversible potential destruction of acres of heathland, habitat, coastline and wetland.
Adam Rowlands, of the bird protection body RSPB, said the dispute was far more than “just a local issue” and posed a real risk to the nearby North Warren nature reserve.
“A nationally important population spends the winter on those marshes,” he said.
The RSPB “absolutely sees the need to transform our energy grid and infrastructure”, he added.
“But we need to do that in a way that doesn’t exacerbate the biodiversity crisis,” he said, adding that offshore options also had disadvantages for marine ecology that had to be considered.
SEAS argues that the UK’s North Sea neighbors such as Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium are already building offshore hubs and that these could work for the UK too.
The actor Ralph Fiennes, who spent his early childhood on the Suffolk coast, has thrown his support behind the drive for offshore alternatives.
“Yes, yes, yes to green power a million times over, the planet is lost without it,” said Fiennes in a short film he made highlighting the ecological cost of the plans.
“But our very real human connection to the coast that defines us will be undermined and eroded unless we… implement that vital green power with a forward-thinking and environmentally enlightened vision,” he said.
Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, however, this week appeared to reject campaigners’ pleas for a pause to reconsider the plans.
On Tuesday he vowed to “take on the blockers, the delayers, the obstructionists” to build clean energy infrastructure.
‘Not listened to’
The campaigners say they have been shaken by the way they have been treated by a system they describe as “not fit for purpose”.
Despite spending hours preparing submissions for the various hearings organized as part of the planning process, Gilmore said the overwhelming impression campaigners had was of “not being listened to”.
And she said the mental health issues for those caught up in the row were “massive”.
People in Friston, near the market town of Saxmundham, “have been living with this nightmare hanging over them for over five years”, she said.
“You can’t just treat people like this.”
Fellow campaigner Charlotte Fox, a retired intensive care anesthetist, said she initially accepted National Grid’s decision, believing it and the government were working in the national interest.
But after doing some research she said she concluded that there was now a “perfectly viable alternative option that is cheaper, better, faster” without the destruction that would be caused by what she considers an outdated scheme.
“What is the point of causing all this destruction and damaging the biodiversity that we are trying to save in the first place?”
