GREAT NEWS!!!!!

Today, Ed Miliband and the Department for Energy and Climate Change published the government's long-awaited Renewable Energy Strategy.

Britain, currently lagging behind the rest of Europe in the renewable energy stakes, is to see a massive increase in renewable energy generation over the next decade, with wind at the heart of the strategy.

As tonight's Channel 4 News showed, the CBI is all in favour of these developments, seeing fantastic investment opportunities, with the proviso that the UK government must sort out the farce that is planning.

As predicted in this blog, the DECC is setting up and Office for Renewable Energy Deployment to improve the planning system. What this, presumably, will mean is that planning decisions over windfarms will be taken out of local hands - which means that district councillors will not have to yelled at by raging mobs of idiots who don't know what they're on about.

And, to combat the arguments of nimby groups like VVASP that wind is simply too unreliable, the government is looking into a 'smart grid' capable of compensating for fluctuations in energy supply.

So - ScottishPower Renewables can, if it chooses, delay submitting planning proposals for the Lenchwick Windfarm until the government has sorted out its new, more sensible planning system. Or it can submit its plans this autumn on the reasonable assumption that the decision will not, in the end, be taken by Wychavon DC.

BUT - the pointless, misguided waste of tax payers' money by the local parish councils must stop immediately! Wasting our money on the VVASP's campaign, via the puppet-intermediary of Church Lench Parish Council's 'Windfarm Working Party', no longer has any purpose whatsoever. It was a bad idea in the first place. Now, it is probable that it will just be money down the drain - OUR money!

We who have seen the future and were on the right side of the debate all along can, however, allow ourselves a glass of champers, or maybe a nice local cider. Because the news from the DECC today is good news: just what the country needs.

And VVASP and others like them can go take a very long hike! Ha-ha!!