Eco warrior husband of Adele slams wind farm
‘Missed the mark’
HAVING founded an ecofriendly water bottle company and a charity that campaigns to provide clean water to poor countries, Simon Konecki is green through and through.
But the eco-warrior, who is married to singer Adele, has been left rather red-faced after turning his sights on an offshore wind farm.
In an emotive two- and- a- half minute video, his company Life Water accuses E. On of having scarred the South Downs national park in West Sussex with massive trenches for power cables.
Drone footage shows the 40ft-wide ditches running eight miles through beautiful countryside including the Adur valley. But the claim that they had left a ‘ten-year’ eyesore in the county where Old Etonian Konecki and his multiple Grammy Awardwinning wife bought a home earlier this year, was rubbished by the power company yesterday. E.On said the land would be ‘quickly returned’ to its original state when the soil is returned next year.
And even Green party co-leader Caroline Lucas dismissed 43-yearold Konecki’s concerns, saying the attack ‘missed the mark’.
Rampion wind farm was approved in 2014 and consists of 116 turbines a few miles offshore providing 400MW of energy from next year – enough to power 300,000 homes.
E.On agreed to pay the park authority £242,500 ‘in mitigation’ for the trenches and a further £116,000 to cover a ten-year monitoring programme overseeing the return of the habitat and wildlife to their original state.
The Life Water video features a comment from Colin Carre, the Rampion project officer for the park, saying: ‘There is a ten-year cycle to get it back to its original state.’ He goes on to say re-turfing the entire route would have been ‘too time-consuming’.
Members of the public are then shown voicing their dismay at the length of time.
But a park spokesman told The Sunday Telegraph: ‘We are disappointed that our comments have been taken out of context.
‘It’s important that the route is restored to the highest standard.
‘However, as the film-maker was aware, most of the route is farmland which will quickly return to pasture or crops when the soil is completely returned next year.’
E.On said: ‘This film contains a number of inaccurate statements about Rampion,’ adding that ‘the visual impact on the South Downs will be entirely temporary’.
Life Water TV producer Louis Berry said: ‘We are very supportive of wind farms including Rampion but it doesn’t mean that the current system is above criticism.’