1 In the quiet countryside near the town of Amlwych in the UK, there are thirty-four huge windmills standing together on a hill. All day the wind turns them round and round. Each windmill is over 30 metres high. This is a wind farm. The thirty-four windmills produce enough electricity for 14,000 homes.
2 Wind farms are different from other ways of producing electricity. They are clean because they don't produce air pollution. And they are cheap. The windmills are quite expensive to build, but the wind is free.
3 'We should build more wind farms,' says Ray McBride. Ray is a farmer, and some of the windmills were built on his land by an electricity company. 'We get a lot of wind here in the UK. But wind farms produce only 2.5 per cent of our electricity. In Denmark 25 per cent of their electricity comes from wind farms.'
4 But some people don't like wind farms. Ann Cox, who lives near the wind farm says,
'I came to live here because it's a beautiful part of the country. Then they built those huge ugly windmills. They spoil the countryside. I don't think they're good for the environment at all.'
5 People may not agree about wind farms, but the British government thinks they are important for the country's future. More than ten farms have even been built out at sea! And more are planned. Wind power in the UK is here to stay.