Lincolnshire County Council in wind farm fight back

The council do not want new wind farms to be built within six miles of villages

The Conservative-led council is preparing a fight back against new wind farm developments in Lincolnshire.

Lincolnshire County Council is expected to endorse new restrictions on the building of wind farms.

The authority's leader Martin Hill said he did not want the county to be covered by a "forest" of wind turbines.

The council will vote on Wednesday on new guidance introducing a presumption against allowing any more wind farms to be built.

The council is to issue a position statement saying that new wind farms should not be built within six miles of villages comprising more than 10 homes.

Mr Hill said: "We have already got 75, there are several hundred in the pipeline, and really, as representing Lincolnshire, I don't think we want the whole county to be covered by a forest of the things."

'Easy win'

The authority does not have control of planning issues, which are handled by the district councils.

But Mr Hill said he expected the district councils and other authorities, including the government, to "take into account" the view of the elected county councillors.

A ComRes survey, published in The Independent newspaper on Monday, suggested that 68% said new wind farms were an acceptable price to pay for greener energy.

It said support for wind farms was even higher, at 80%, among 18 to 44-year-olds, while it was 59% for the over-45s.

Conservative MP Tim Yeo, chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, said: "There is certainly a backlash against onshore wind at the moment."

However, he said the UK needed to move to cleaner energy and stressed there was an economic case for onshore wind.

He said: "Onshore wind is a quick and fairly easy win. The technology exists, the costs are coming down and the costs of subsidising onshore are less than half those of offshore."