When the news arrived out of the blue, John Constable could hardly believe it. An energy company was planning to erect six giant wind turbines, each 300ft high, with blades longer than the wing of a jumbo jet, just 700 yards from his farmhouse in the Suffolk village of Great Glemham.

Constable, a Cambridge University poetry expert, his mother and his seven-year-old son were aghast. The view from the house — with its oak trees, orchard and wild meadow populated by red admiral butterflies — would be ruined by the turbines.

“It’s creating outrage in the village,” said Constable, a descendant of the artist John Constable. So in January, he and other villagers joined the burgeoning ranks of Britain’s anti-wind farm campaigners to fight the plans.

Just another bunch of nimbies? How can they object if wind power is clean, simple and cheap? On the face of it, it would be all too easy to portray Constable and other protesters now springing up all over the country as small-minded and self-centred. Instead, by a strange reversal of opinion, they are winning increasing support from scientists, experts in renewable energy and even green campaigners.

As the costs and impact of wind power become better understood, divisions are opening up over its merits. On Friday at a conference in Edinburgh, Sir Martin Holdgate, an expert in renewable energy who once supported wind farms, fiercely criticised plans for expansion of the power-generating technique.

Holdgate believes wind farms are not worth the cost and environmental impact: they require large areas to produce only small amounts of energy. Wind turbines will simply not produce enough to save Britain from the effects of global warming and are draining resources that might be better spent elsewhere.

Sir Ian Fells, professor of energy conversion at Newcastle University and one of the world’s leading renewable energy experts, said that for wind power to contribute just 5% of Britain’s electricity supply would “take a Herculean effort and a lot of subsidy”. He calculates that to achieve such a target would require a “subsidy” — that is, extra payments by customers above normal energy rates — of £8 billion by 2010.

In fact, behind the turbines sprouting across the landscape is a goldrush sparked by incentives created by a government struggling to meet its own targets for renewable energy. It has led to developers racing to build turbines with little care for the environment.

Tom Burke, a former director of Friends of the Earth, supports wind energy in principle but is concerned about its growth: “These wind farm entrepreneurs have seen there is big money to be made but they need to learn the same lesson as other developers, that they cannot just decide what they want and then do it.”

Professor David Bellamy, the naturalist, is campaigning against wind farms, warning of “plans that will make the British coastline ugly and impossible for birdlife”. He condemns the “government’s naive belief that wind farms produce green electricity”.

Even Jonathon Porritt, doyen of greens and former director of Friends of the Earth, has reservations. Although he strongly supports wind power and believes wind turbines are “compellingly beautiful”, he admits: “The real problem is that people building the things have been insensitive.

“They’ve put some of them in the wrong places and have not consulted local people or involved them in the benefits. The result is there is a growing anti-wind power lobby.”

TEN years ago there were hardly any onshore turbines in Britain and when they did begin to appear, they spread slowly. Today there are more than 1,100 and as numbers have risen, so have concerns. People affected include the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, who has a house in Wales in sight of a planned wind farm. The mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington has protested against wind turbines.

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