The lights could go out in a few years because the Government is "actively trying to obstruct" renewable energy.
That is the view of the region's leading proponent of green energy, Dale Vince, who said the Government's U-turn would be "disastrous" for energy security – with the nation not able to produce enough of its own power in a sustainable way.
The founder and boss of Ecotricity, the Stroud-based renewable energy firm that built the West's first large-scale wind turbine almost 20 years ago, said because the Government was "impeding growth" in renewable energy, it was harder to finance major new projects, and the West's renewable energy boom looked like petering out before it had even begun.
Mr Vince was speaking on the eve of an important date in the battle over the future of wind power in the West. A Government planning inspector is due to hear the arguments over the plan by the region's biggest local authority effectively to ban any kind of large wind turbine being erected anywhere in its patch.
Council chiefs in Wiltshire want a controversial sliding scale put in place enforcing a minimum distance that a large wind turbine has to be from anyone's house – the taller the turbine, the greater the distance, with the bigger, commercial turbines of the kind green energy firms such as Ecotricity want to erect having to be at least 3km (1.6 miles) from the nearest home.
That rule, included in Wiltshire's Core Strategy at the eleventh hour, would effectively ban commercial wind turbines from the county because the only places further than 3km from any house are on the military ranges of Salisbury Plain. There are currently no commercial wind turbines in Wiltshire.
The planning inspector adjudicating on Wiltshire's Core Strategy is holding the public inquiry in Trowbridge and will hear about wind turbines on Thursday.
It is this hindrance of wind turbines, along with planning refusals for Ecotricity's wind farms along the M5 at Berkeley in Gloucestershire and Huntspill in Somerset, that have frustrated Mr Vince, along with constant changes in tariffs – the guaranteed price the Government pledges the National Grid will pay for the power generated by wind and other renewables.
"Confidence has been badly damaged by the way the Government keeps moving the goalposts on subsidies for renewable energy," he said.
