Windfarm plans will cut 'motorway-wide' crater through the countryside

Lancashire County Council will tell the government that “urgent action” is needed to prevent two offshore windfarms wreaking huge onshore damage across the Fylde - in the form of an 18-mile trench “the width of the M55”.

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The authority's intervention comes after councillors united in a cross-party effort to secure an alternative route for the cables that will have to be laid in order to transfer the energy generated by planned turbines in the Irish Sea to the national grid.

A meeting of the full council backed a motion calling for the county council's chief executive to write to the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, encouraging the government and the developer to work with local officials to help plot a different path for the infrastructure required.

Under the current blueprint for the so-called Morgan and Morecambe scheme, the cables would come ashore at St Annes beach and run across the district through the excavated trench to two substations, south of Kirkham and west of Newton-with-Scales.

They would then continue onwards, beneath the Ribble, to their final grid-connection destination at Penwortham.