Sat in late autumn sunshine at a table outside the Red Kite Cottage holiday let, the only sound is clinking cake forks and coffee cups being put down. There are the occasional sounds of birds tweeting, and only when it is pointed out can you hear the hum of traffic in Carmarthen carried by the wind.
The holiday let itself is one of a handful of properties here on this tranquil spot of Carmarthenshire hillside, the neighbouring homes or farms aren’t immediately obvious, tucked away behind trees or hills. Sat partway up a hill, the property has a vantage point across the Towy Valley, you can, just, see the wind turbines of Nantycaws Recycling Centre, far in the distance, and the natural contours of the green slopes reach to either side, giving the local red kites plenty of choice about where to swoop.
The stream of Nant Crychiau runs in the base of the valley, and on a clear day, you can see 360 degrees around to Bannau Brycheiniog, Preseli Hills, and down to the Llansteffan coast.
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The first residents here knew that the landscape they wake to and tend to every day could change beyond all recognition came when a leaflet landed on their doorsteps in January. Some totally even discounted that, throwing it straight into the recycling thinking it was junk mail. For the Jones family, who have the Hengil Fach farm, the first they knew was when they saw a Facebook post complete with a map showing a proposed line the pylons going straight through their land.
They and many other farming families along two huge pylon highways planned to dissect rural mid and west Wales fear the pylons will destroy their way of life and the countryside they’ve managed for generations. Farm fields, they say would become unusable, tourist visitors would desert tents, cabins and holiday lets in the shadow of pylons and power lines. And it would devastate complex ecosystems of flora and fauna.
Rhiannon Jones said: “It was such a shock. It came out of nowhere.”
As awareness, and concern grew, local residents have joined forces with neighbours in the Towy Valley, now there are Whatsapp groups and public meetings being held. “Everyone was incensed,” said Dr Pete Cumber.
There is currently not the capacity in the existing electricity network to connect new power generation units to the national grid. And that’s where GreenGEN Cymru comes in. It has proposals for two major new lines of pylons running through the heart of rural Wales.
One is a 32-mile, new 132kV overhead line carried on 27 metre high pylons, connecting a proposed new energy park at Lan Fawr, north of Lampeter, down to a new National Grid substation in Carmarthen.
The planned Towy Teifi route -Credit:Green Gen Cymru
Known as the The Towy Teifi line, it would run from Lan Fawr to Lampeter, through Llanllwni, Alltwalis, Rhydargeau and Llandyfaelog.The plan is for it to go for planning approval in 2026, with the earliest a decision could be made in 2026. Construction would commence the following year, with the scheme operational in 2028.
GreenGEN Cymru also has a second scheme, the Towy Usk scheme, which would see a new 132kV connection running 60 miles from Nant Mithil Energy Park to Llandyfaelog going through Aberedw Hill, Llangammach Wells, Llandovery, Llandeilo and Llandyfaelog.
The Towy Usk planned route -Credit:Green Gen Cymru
Both schemes have to be decided by Planning and Environment Decisions Wales (PEDW).
Placards objecting to the plans now line the A485. The grounds for objection vary, there are those concerned about the impact on their health, their farms, or their businesses. They are unhappy at the process, at the way the consultation has been carried out, and the impact it could have on them.
Tourism businesses fear that such a dramatic change to the landscape will end their bookings, farmers fear it will end their deals with supermarkets for their milk, others have already been told the figures, in black and white that their property values will decrease by. Those in opposition are fighting, and plan to keep doing so.
Craig Vaux is coordinating the campaign against the pylons in the Towy Teifi valley. When he arranged a first meeting he called having had a leaflet through his own door he expected around 40 people, but over 90 arrived. Now there are more than 500 objecting.
He thinks it’s just a matter of political will. He said “It’s down to whether there’s political will to make it underground. I’m going to end up with pylons effectively on three sides of our properties. We’re not against green renewable energy. We are against this putting pylons through the valley and in particular the fact that they’re 27m high and they will destroy the landscape and have an effect on tourism and more.”
Their current battle is to stop the developer’s plans by preventing them carrying out surveys of the land. In an early letter, landowners were asked to sign up to a voluntary survey of their land, told they would get £500. Dr Pete Cumber: “I almost signed up thinking ‘oh, £500 for not doing a lot’ until I realised the implications.”
Those implications are that access would be day or night without warning for up to 104 days in a year. For Nicki, that is impossible when she promises guests to her holiday let privacy, and for working farmers, the concerns are the impact it would have on their livestock. If the pylons are built, the landowners where they are housed have been told they’ll get compensation of £3,000, a flat, one-off fee.
There are numerous types of surveys they have been told would be carried out geological, bats or dormice. They have questions about who is carrying out the surveys, which remain unanswered.
None of those gathered at Red Kite Cottage took up the initial offer of survey. But then the legal letters arrived quoting section 172 of the Housing and Planning Act 2016 which compels them to allow access to their land for surveys to be carried out. If anyone tried to obstruct the survey then being carried out, they could be fined or face civil court proceedings.
Residents are refusing to allow surveys of their property -Credit:WalesOnline/Rob Browne
One letter requesting access says: “We would rather not resort to potentially using any statutory powers and very much hope a mutually agreed arrangement can be agreed”. A later letter, sent to someone who had refused to allow access, says action is now being taken under the law.
The maps online and in brochures sent to the homeowners who could be affected show a line where the line would run, but there is no confirmed route yet with an admission that the lines position could be tweaked. That in itself is something causing concern.
For Nicki, she expects there would be two to three pylons over the four fields of 25 acres she owns. She has run the holiday cottage for 18 years, diversifying to tourism after TB impacted her breeding herd of cattle. Her neighbours now rent her fields for their livestock “and I farm people now instead of livestock,” she jokes. She adapted a second building around eight years ago into a “back to basic glamping”.
Nicki Robinson has diversified into two holiday lets but worries people will not come visit if their view of animals is replaced by pylons -Credit:WalesOnline/Rob Browne
“The views here are the unique selling point, we’re not near a castle or a beach or anything, we’re not a tourism hotspot,” she said. She always recommends guests go for a walk up to the top of the neighbouring hill where you can, on a clear day, see views reaching as far as the Bannau Brycheiniog, Preseli Hills, and down to the Llansteffan coast.
“That’s all part of their experience, they’re not going to enjoy it looking at pylons. At the minute they look out of the windows at calves, this just negates the whole thing, they’re not going to be repeat customers.”
She rents one field to her farming neighbours and says it be useless to them if the pylon is in it.
“These fields have oak trees that are several hundreds of years old, and established wildlife colonies, and bat feeding corridors, and raptor flight paths . How can they be allowed to destroy all that forever?” she asked.
“This project must be cable ploughed or not all, our land cannot become wildlife free wastelands. Once these creatures are moved off due to being disturbed they will not ever return. The raptors cannot fly their feeding zones with cables and pylons in their flightpath.”
Richard Jones farms Helygenlas. “With us, we’d probably have between five or six pylons, running through 80 acres. One pylon would be about 40m from the livestock buildings, the overhang might be closer. The issues with pylons are health issues, and I’m worried about that in terms of humans and livestock. Insects stay away from pylons because of the static, that’s why you don’t have many flowering plants around them. My son has beehives on the farm and we produce honey for ourselves and others, and the pylons would be going directly over the hives.”
He sells his milk to First Milk, the farmer’s cooperative, and his milk makes cheese for sale in Tesco stores. “We had to do a lot of things to be able to get extra funding, put a biodiversity plan in place for Tesco. We had to build habitats, put ponds on the farm, we had to monitor wildlife, we’ve got a bat corridor which has a colony of bats on it, red kites. We’ve got orchids growing, I’ve had to plant trees, the minimum for Tesco is 10 per year, and we’ve also planted fruit trees for pollinators and insects. We’ve fenced corridors to encourage wildlife to move from one part to another, we’ve a good population of badgers and foxes,” said Richard.
Richard Jones of Helygenlas farm worries about the health impact on him, and his livestock, if the pylons go ahead -Credit:WalesOnline/Rob Browne
“If we had pylons going so close to the property, it devalues my property by £300,000 or £400,000. It makes me look not as impressive when they come out, because we have audits with all these, Tesco and First Milk. They see the cattle out in the field, naturally, you see the lambs in the spring and they take pictures. When you go to Tesco or Morrisons, you see those pictures of cattle but you never see a pylon in those pictures,” he said.
If he does not meet their requirements, he could lose those contracts. “It’s a very close margin we have with milk production, with any food production actually, but you try and get the consumer over by producing something that’s healthy and good for you. These pylons through off a lot of static electricity, and too much of it, radiation causes illness. Having one so close to my property, I’m very wary of what will come off it,” he said.
He has, he says, little faith his concerns will be answered. “It’s a money making organisation in for a pot of money and then they’ll move on and sell the business to someone else. I don’t mind if it geos underground but it has to go all the way. I know there will be a mess, but nature can repair itself, always. I’m quite angry about the way they’ve approached us, and the aggression we’ve had off them. It’s not people who are courteous to landowners, it affects us.”
Huw Jones neighbours Richard Jones’ land with the pylons proposed to go down the centre of their land – they expect nearer to Richard’s, rather than Huw’s, but that isn’t clear. “We are not against whatever they’re up to, producing electricity or undergrounding, but we are totally against this dictatorship to reach Ed Miliband’s target. They’re going about it without looking at the potentially of the undergrounding, and they are blinded,” he said.
“It is a blot on the landscape,” he said. “There’s the noise pollution and people have said there have been cancer clusters, my biggest thing is we’re all for the electricity but it isn’t going to be for our advantage here, it will be shipped away somewhere. It could go abroad, we don’t know. We are all for everything they want, but not in the way they’re doing it.” said Huw Jones.
For Catrin Jones the project is “too big”. “There’s no doubt it will go to National Grid and go into England”. “It should be more local, if we need renewable energy then the project should be much smaller,” she said. “Then it would be a smaller scale and relevant to our area, it wouldn’t take up all the land,” she said. “It’s the same as coal and water, companies coming in who don’t care about local people and rural affairs are the ones suffering”.
Their family has three neighbouring farms run by brothers, who moved there in 1959. The plans show there would likely be seven pylons across the three dairy farms. Catrin has concerns too about livestock, and health of their families: “But, emotionally, the next generation…”
Rhiannon Jones, centre, wants to continue farming her family land but fears for its future -Credit:WalesOnline/Rob Browne
Her youngest daughter Rhiannon is to her side as we speak. She wants to farm, as do her cousins. “It’d be heartbreaking to see pylons going through the land. They just don’t care. They just probably drew the plans and a line through a farm and didn’t think ‘that’s a family there, that’s where we’ve been born, where dad was brought up’.”
Catrin explains it is a strong Welsh language community. They were advised the pylons would take a third of the value of their farm away. Roy said: “Maybe I’ll be gone but I’m thinking of the next generation”.
“We would be letting the next generation down if we weren’t fighting for the Towy Valley and the Teifi Valley,” said Catrin. “It’s only the tip of the iceberg, I think Wales will suffer immensely if this goes ahead,” he said.
Dr Pete Cumber has a smallholding of 13 acres. One of his major concerns is the way the building process would take place with roads built especially to cater for the pylons. “You’ve got to build a road to bring in heavy machinery to dig huge holes. Concrete takes up an awful lot of CO2 to make it, bring in tonnes of steel which I guess now with Port Talbot would come from overseas.” He said his understanding is that cable undergrounding on land such as in their valley would be “fairly easy”.
“My strong feeling is they should be thinking of undergrounding. There is the potential health impact to birds, they’re quite damaging to birds, there is an argument that there’s an increased risk of childhood acute leukaemia,” he said. “A lot of people argue that having them close to human habitation is detrimental,” he added.
Hundreds of people are objecting to the plans -Credit:WalesOnline/Rob Browne
“We’re only five families here,” says Huw Jones. “If they took them closer to the villages and towns you’d have hundreds of thousands of people objecting,” he said. The belief being it is placed where it is because there will be less numbers in opposition.
You could go anywhere in the valley and speak to people who are worried. A further 11-minute drive north will take you to Dol Coed, a campsite run by Jo Eveleigh and her husband Mike. They moved to Carmarthenshire in 2017, transforming what was, she described, as a semi-derelict farm into a campsite including holiday lets, a pool, their own home and a shared utility barn. The business is their only asset.
“The only asset that we have is our company campsite. We had it valued last year and we were quite gobsmacked at how much it had increased, we have spent every penny we’ve got building the business, and we unfortunately we had it valued again recently and the potential is a deficit of nearly £400,000 all since the pylons because the estate agent said to us, if they go ahead they’ll have a massive impact.
We have put every penny we’ve ever had into that place. For us, it could have a catastrophic impact,” she said.
“If it happens, it’s going to happen very quickly. There’s going to come a time in the near future, we’re in our 50s, where we’re going to want to retire and having ploughed every penny we’ve ever made into this place, to have it potentially taken away is just…
“People have said, ‘well you’ll get compensation’ but I know with people who’ve had compensation, and had £10,000 or £20,000, that doesn’t equate to a kind of a monumental loss that we could potentially have.”
There is a strong feeling that cables should be laid underground, not above ground and carried by large pylons. On the Towy Usk scheme, post an initial consulation, it was decided the River Towy near Llanarthney would be undergrounded rather than overhead “to reduce the potential for effects on the views and landscape”.
Signs line the roads along the proposed route in Carmarthenshire -Credit:WalesOnline/Rob Browne
One of the leaflets from GreenGEN Cymru references the choice of pylons rather than undergrounding. “Our investigations show that underground cables require more land and create more ground disturbance during construction. This could also lead to longer term ecological and environmental impacts. Using pylons will allow us to provide a new connection quickly, with minimal disruption to the land, allowing us to fight back against climate change as soon as we can.”
The company says it is “working with industry experts” to get an accurate cost of delivering the project underground but they say they believe overhead lines are “the most viable and cost-effective option at this stage for delivering a connection quickly”. The company does say that it will assess if any parts of the connection need to be placed underground “for example in highly constrained or particularly sensitive areas.”
But, they are not just campaigning against GreenGEN Cymru, but governments too. The Welsh Government’s position is that new power lines should, where possible, be put underground but “that a balanced view must be taken against costs which could render otherwise acceptable projects unviable”.
In June, there was a debate in the Senedd where Plaid Cymru called for the Welsh Government to update its guidance that the policy should categorically state “new power lines should be laid underground” and the caveat about cost be removed because, Adam Price MS told the Senedd: “As long as the caveat exists, developers will always exploit it and build pylons as their preferred option”.
They say the guidance isn’t working because when they asked for specific examples where electricity lines have been undergrounded, the Welsh Government said it was not aware of any single example. The Conservatives say undergrounding cables improves reliability, reduces the risks of outages, and protects the landscape of Wales.
The then minister in charge, Julie James, said the government would prefer cables to go underground, but they disagreed with opposition parties on whether it was appropriate to mandate all cables to be underground. She said there were places it was “physically possible” for cables to go underground but people wouldn’t want it. She did however say “I think we do need to tighten up what we mean by ‘unaffordable’ in a very big way”.
The UK Labour Government has made it clear it wants to deliver clean power by 2030. Ed Miliband told trade body Energy UK: “Every wind turbine we put up, every solar panel we install, every piece of grid we construct helps protect families from future energy shocks…Previous governments have ducked and dithered and delayed these difficult decisions, and here is the thing: it is the poorest in our society who have paid the price.”
In vowing to make Britain a “clean energy super power” he said he would take on the blockers, the delayers, the obstructionists”.
The Welsh Government has set up an independent advisory group for future electricity grid for Wales which will look at undergrounding of electricity cables and cable ploughing. That is due to report back in spring 2025.
The campaigners want to know if undergrounding is being considered, and whether a proper costing of the most up to date technology has been carried out. While two small sections of the Towy line are being proposed for cables to be put underground – at Aberglasney and the National Botanic Gardens – they say outdated figures are being quoted as to why it is not a viable alternative. The Countryside Alliance has called for an independent review about how much undergrounding would cost which would also take into consideration the potential disbenefits of choosing pylon infrastructure such as the visual impact they would have, the knock-on effect on the economy and the effect on people’s health and well-being. But, having obtained the terms of reference of the Welsh Government’s advisory group, they are concerned it will not look at the wider impact pylon infrastructure could have.
For Craig, it feels inherently David v Goliath. “All this is going to be decided by a two or three people in a Pedr committee in Cardiff and we have no right to appeal.”
A lengthy statement from GreenGEN Cymru responded to the concerns. “Tackling the climate emergency, connecting new community and renewable energy projects, creating and expanding businesses and electrifying our heating and transport systems will all require more grid capacity. These are challenge that Wales faces, ones that need to be tackled urgently and ones that we are trying to help address.
“Whether it is undergrounding cables, wood poles or lattice towers, across our projects all suitable technology options are being considered, reviewed and utilised and typically a network will involve a combination of technologies. Throughout Wales and the wider UK, electricity connections are a tried and tested technology that have been operating safely within communities for decades. This includes areas popular with tourism and on agricultural land.
“Towy Teifi and Towy Usk, along with all our projects, are currently going through consultation phases where we are asking for feedback on our proposals. As is standard across the industry, changes are made between these stages.
“For example, thanks to feedback and further environmental and technical assessments, numerous changes were made on Towy Usk. This includes a 5.5km of underground section near Llanarthne and the rerouting of the project to better avoid tourism businesses near Builth Wells.
“Our second round of consultation on our Towy Teifi project will launch in the spring where we will be able to share updated proposals and where we will once again be asking for detailed feedback.
“In terms of agriculture, if approved, the towers we would propose to use on our 132kv overhead line are around half the size of the transmission pylons already seen in places like Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire along the M4. There is no evidence that overhead lines and pylons have a materially adverse impact on livestock or grazing behavior which can continue up to and within the footings of the pylons.
“The footprint of the pylons currently proposed for the Towy Teifi connection will be modest. Except in the footprint of the pylon, it is anticipated the normal farming practice will be able to continue under the overhead lines. Detailed consideration of pylon siting and overhead line alignment during the design and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process will seek to reduce the loss of agricultural land and disruption of agricultural activities to the extent feasible.
“We will work closely with farmers and landowners in developing the project to understand their concerns and to reduce any effects on their operation of their land as much as possible.
“GreenGEN Cymru’s overwhelming preference is to seek voluntary engagements with landowners and as such we and our external land agents have been actively engaged in negotiating voluntary agreements with landowners on the Towy Teifi project since January 2024. Unfortunately we have been unable to reach voluntary agreements with all landowners, and some as a result have recently received statutory notice under s172 of the Housing & Planning Act.
“All landowners have been offered and continue to be offered in person meeting with members of the GGC team and our external land agents. It is always stressed that agreeing to surveys in no way restricts landowners’ ability to respond to project consultations or express their views on our proposals.”