
John Page was born in the West Riding, a proud Yorkshireman and was taught to play cricket left-handed “ ’cos it flummoxes t’ bowler, and buggers up t’ field.” He went to university in London and Leeds, and enjoyed (most of the time) attempting to teach young people that there’s a big wide world beyond the Colne and Worth Valleys. He also taught future captains of industry and government at the United World College of SE Asia in Singapore for four years. Except Antarctica, John has travelled and climbed extensively on all the world’s continents, with friends and with Hil, his wife of 44 years. Still very active in his seventies, retirement from paid employment was the best career move that he ever made.
Turbine 53: Hoar Nib SD 95898 32176 ///fire.printer.rotations

9 December 2024. “……there are known knowns, there are things we know. We also know that there are known unknowns, that is to say there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns —- the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” Donald Rumsfeld 12.02.2002.
The world’s economy is a mess of sticks and carrots, bribes and disincentives using smoke and mirrors. A South African gold miner once said, while sitting in a shebeen in Soweto, that he spent all his working days deep underground digging out gold which was then stored, deep underground in places like Fort Knox. And that was the basis of international trade. He sweated away, risked his life, not seeing his family for weeks on end, while those who traded the gold on computer screens in their air conditioned offices, had servants and swimming pools in their large, family homes. He didn’t think it was fair. Nor do I.
I thought of that as I started my walk down the cobbles of Heptonstall to the Post Office. Twelve years ago I was offered a bribe by Mr Cameron, the multi-millionaire Prime Minister. He had a small wind turbine on the roof of his London house, told us that he rode his bike to Waitrose’s to do the family shopping and he was an early advocate of green energy. His bribe was to incentivise me to buy some solar panels to fix onto my roof. Needless to say, I considered his proposal carefully.
Firstly, I worked out how much 16 British-made solar panels would cost (from a company in Darlington) and how much some chaps in the Calder Valley would charge me to set up the whole system on my roof, and sort out the interior inverter, the wiring and everything else. I had no idea about how it all worked (and still don’t). I looked at past sunshine figures in sunny Heptonstall, worked out how much power the panels would generate over a twelve month period and then how much the newly set up Feed-In-Tariff would pay me. Also, did I have access to enough capital to fund this investment? If all my calculations, on the back of a British Gas envelope, were sound then Mr Cameron’s bribe was a “no brainer”. I signed up. The wonderfully cheery chaps from my valley did their stuff ( baffling me continually with techno speak) for three days, and then they went home. I sat back for six years, watching the kW hours build up, putting on the washing machine only when it was light outside and not just before I went to bed as had been my normal practice. After six years Mr Cameron had paid off my initial capital outlay, but by that time he was out of a government job because he’d so badly misjudged the feeling of the country over its membership of the EU. Still, his successors (lots of them) continued to pay the bribe, now free money, to me every three months; and they will continue to do so for the next 13 years (I signed up for 25 years}. Mr Cameron’s bribe has worked for me, the Darlington solar panel company, the cheery Calder Valley men and for the environment. I now use less thermally produced power (although I must admit to having a log stove which I’m told is not carbon efficient, though Which? said Burley stoves were the most eco-friendly in the world. Heigh ho!)
Anyway, the Post Office in our small village was going to close down a few years ago, so The Community had a whip round, created many thousands of pounds worth of shares and we bought it. We’ll probably never get a monetary return on our “investment” but the good it has done for the community is incalculable. Economics is not just about financial returns. It’s run by Postmaster Tim and his team of dedicated local volunteers. It is thriving. I paid into my bank account the cheque of free money that the feed-in tariff had recently sent me and explained to the assembled folk that I was on my way across the valley to Shackleton to look at Hilltop Cottage, a lived-in dwelling that Electricity Northwest has shown me, with a big red arrow on their website (I’m now a registered user of their Embedded Capacity Register), is to be the substation for whatever electricity is generated by the Calderdale Windfarm, which I call the Industrial Estate, because that’s what it is.


Needless to say in the Heptonstall “callin’ ‘ole”, as we call the PO, the notion of bribery was brought up. The £75,000,000 (and 300,000 trees) incentive that CWF are offering would go into a “Calderdale Wealth Fund”. That sounds like a lot of money. So I explained that, as with Mr Cameron’s bygone bribe, I’d again done a back of an envelope calculation.
Calderdale Council, serving Calderdale with a population of around 208,700, has had to make the equivalent of £125 million of savings on its services for each year since 2010. £75 million goes nowhere to fill the gap carved out by cuts in funding from Central Government. Indeed, if delivered, over the 30 year life span of the CWF project, the financial incentive would only work out at £11.98 per person per year. And what will £12 be worth in a few years time?
Still, I was a bit warmer and my bank balance was now balanced so I walked down the Calderdale Way to the National Trust Midgehole car park, one of two official car parks for Hardcastle Crags. The other is on Widdop Road above the Crags. I’m going to walk to T53 along the start of the route of the cable from Shackleton to Rochdale. I leave the car park between dry stone walls.

As I’ve intimated I’m not very knowledgeable about the real-world (or even theoretical) movement of electricity. I obviously know that there are different ways to generate it; some bad, some less bad. I know that once it’s generated somehow it gets “transported” along/through wires, often using unsightly pylons, or by digging a trench and then burying a (very) thick cable, or pair of cables, housed in a duct several feet below ground. I’m trying to make sense of building a wind farm on unique peatlands, 30km away from an access point to the National Grid, in a different county.
Then, following Nick MacKinnon’s scrutiny of CWF’s paperwork, it would seem that the power produced on Walshaw Moor will enter the local network at Norden electricity substation (never Padiham as the website stated) 28km away. And, as I understand it, even though the electricity will only be used locally because the National Grid substation at Norden is full. How local is local? I don’t really understand this. I live 1000m across the valley from Hilltop Cottage, the house where the electricity would supposedly change its original format, in Yorkshire, but it will only be used in Lancashire by folk in the Rochdale area once its voltage has been changed again in Norden. Baffling. I know that I obtained my degrees in a distant era, but I’m not that dim; so why don’t I understand it? Money generated from fossil fuels in Saudi Arabia funds an industrial estate on ecologically sensitive peatland in Yorkshire, that might produce electricity which magically changes form in a cottage and then again in a “proper substation” 30km away so that the lights can stay on while I listen to the wonderful organ being played in Rochdale Town Hall, but a friend on the Widdop Road can’t use that (we’re told much cheaper) CWF electricity to watch Match of the Day, let alone Strictly.
I’m hoping on this walk to attempt to hazard a guess at a potential route for transporting electricity, possibly for over 30 odd kilometres, across a landscape that ought to be part of a South Pennine Regional Park. Although a 132kV cable can be carried on wooden poles, the scoping report mentions a buried cable, and provided it follows quiet thoroughfares the trench can be dug discreetly for about £1.2m/km. Undergrounding a 132kV 300MW cable is much less expensive relative to overground than burying the National Grid.
So my route (the deep trench) would be following the existing NT roads from Shackleton to the Midgehole car park, along Midgehole Road to the Keighley Road, through Hebden Bridge, under the A646 and on to the Rochdale Canal towpath. My editor, Nick MacKinnon, says this use of the canal is “genius” and we hope I haven’t given CWF any ideas.

The canal runs almost continuously westwards for 25km to Castleton, just south of Rochdale. With a bit of civil engineering jiggery pokery the tube would leave the canal near the Blue Pitts Inn, cross the Trans Pennine railway and Manchester Road; and then CWF would have to dig another deep trench along Heywood Road. At the end of the road there’s already a 275kV power line that goes directly to Norden substation. Can CWF use the existing pylons; could they build complementary ones alongside or use the, at present, mainly not built-on Green Belt land to dig another trench, or would it be better to just continue another 1.6km along the canal towpath as it turns southwards and link up with the same 275kV transmission line, which I reckon would probably be the most sensible option if it were technically feasible, I don’t know; I don’t really want to know and I wonder if CWF have even got this far in their planning. My own planning is shown below, on the back of an envelope.


I walked up a newly surfaced track to Shackleton, pleased to see that it is surfaced in limestone because the local stone is too weak and porous to be used as a roadstone or for concrete. I wandered around the half a dozen buildings in the small hamlet of Savile Estate green doors, whose history is worthy of another blog. There are estate workers’ tied cottages. Then I braved the chilly northerly wind up the old occupation lane as far as the very boggy Turn Hill. From there I could look across to the boundary of the CWF estate which follows the intake wall, and then let my old eyes roam up through the disused sandstone quarries towards Shackleton Knoll and T6. There doesn’t seem to be any technical obstacle to a trench across here, but that’s me, with no civil engineering background or after doing any on-site surveying, just making a quick visual assessment in icy conditions with my woolly hat pulled down over my ears and the padded hood of my coat pulled right up tight.




So that was me done; except it wasn’t. These blogs involve walking to a proposed turbine site and, although the shortest day of the year was less than a fortnight away, there were plenty of daylight hours left, Storm Darragh was behind us and there was no sign of Eowyn forming yet, out in the North Atlantic and it’s a flat walk on estate tracks for the most part. So I trundled on towards Walshaw Lodge, looking up the fields on my right to Field Head derelict farm; a more practical location for a massive electricity substation, rather than somebody’s front room in a house.

Lots to write about Lord Savile’s old hunting lodge but you’ll have to wait; now walking briskly, it’s a bit further on past Mr Bannister’s Head Gamekeeper’s splendidly renovated house before descending down the now tarmac track to Holme Bridge. It’s significant that as the track levels out there was a large outwash delta of sandstone debris. Mr Bannister‘s men have put in another new track (not shown on any publicly available maps) running due east towards the New Laithe Moor shelter belt of trees. The road had crushed sandstone, and occasional house bricks(!), as its topping to aid quad bikes up the initial steep slope before the angle eases off to grass on the gentle slope up to T53. The sandstone road has been severely washed out as Ashley, Bert, Connal and Darragh have stormed through. Will Eowyn, Floris and Gerben finally wash the rest away?



The home straight was down to Blake Dean, along the Widdop Road. I did, however, call on a good friend of mine on the way who is an engineer, to seek his advice on how CWF might practically implement some of their proposals. Although he does make an excellent cup of tea, he did keep reminding me that he was a mechanical, not an electrical, engineer. He had some quite frightening insights though, into the problems of using very large cranes in the middle of moorland which consists of water and carbon retaining peat that’s up to 5m deep.
And so the negatives continue around this ill-conceived speculation.
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This is the 27th in a series of 65 guest blogs on each of the wind turbines which Richard Bannister plans to have erected on Walshaw Moor. Turbines 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 16, 17, 21, 25, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 40, 43, 44, 47, 54, 56, 58, 62, 64 and 65 have already been described. To see all the blogs – click here.
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