Well, not smaller than Wales, but the landscape is very different in Denmark from what it is in Wales and they’re surrounded by a good deal more water, proportionately, than we are in Wales. Denmark has enormous agglomerations of windmills in the sea, whereas we have, relatively speaking, fewer.

There are 88,000 pylons throughout the United Kingdom. I don’t know what the figure is for Wales, but in my view, they are a blot on the landscape. Some man-made structures, like the Menai bridge, are an addition to the landscape, and the poets and writers of the early nineteenth century, alluded to by old uncle David here, of course, regarded them as part of the sublime and the beautiful. But I don’t think anybody’s ever written a poem about a pylon as yet.

I do think that we have to face the reality that if we are going to operate in a world of artificially increased electricity prices, this is going to have very significant adverse effects on the country. We’ve adopted a policy commitment enshrined in law—the only country in the world to do so—of cutting our carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. Now, this implies that, by 2030—only 13 years away now—we will end cooking and heating by gas, which will mean we’ll be consuming more electricity, and therefore, we’ll need even more powerlines in order to distribute it; and 60 per cent of cars will be electric by then, which will require even more electricity. Quite how we’re going to achieve this, considering that fossil fuels currently generate more than half our electricity, I don’t know.

The total cost of this in terms of subsidies and carbon taxes between 2014 and 2020 alone is £90 billion—that’s equivalent to £3,500 per household in the United Kingdom. Michelle Brown referred to the impact that fuel prices have upon the incomes of those who are at the lower end of the income scale. I think that this is a very important element that we should consider. In Wales, there are 291,000 households in fuel poverty—that’s 23 per cent of the total—and meanwhile, the subsidies that are paid for these renewable energy projects are going into the hands, very often, of rich landowners like David Cameron’s father-in-law who earns £1,000 a day from it.

So, whilst I broadly support the aims of the Plaid Cymru motion, I do believe that the exercise would be almost pointless in the era that we live in of artificially increased energy prices to fund renewable projects, which are themselves perhaps an even bigger blot on the landscape than the pylons that are sought to be replaced.