Large parts of mid and north Wales are plastered with wind-turbines, while across Wales as a whole the planning pipeline is stuffed with applications for about another 75 developments, including turbines of up to 250 metres, or nearly five times the height of Nelson’s Column.

Yet Wales is already a net exporter of electricity, using only about half the amount it generates. Forty per cent goes to England, where new onshore windfarms have been more or less banned since 2018. If the proposed installations go ahead, optimum wind capacity alone will be more than three times Wales’s own energy requirements.

But, just as with water exports, the financial return for Wales is abysmally low, while aesthetically, and in terms of landscape protection, there are strong reasons for halting expansion.

Previously uncluttered and ecologically important landscapes are invaded by industrial structures whose massive concrete foundations often detract enormously from the land’s role in soaking up high rainfall, lessening flooding risks. Service roads and sub-stations are ugly. All right, some people like the look of turbines, even I don’t mind the odd few - at a distance. But, overall, enough is enough.

The bulk of Wales-resident windfarms are owned by overseas companies - German, Italian, Australian, Norwegian, Swedish, Irish.

The biggest in Wales and England is at Pen y Cymoedd, near Aberdare, its 76 turbines owned by Vattenfall, a company owned entirely by the Swedish state. Profits from its Welsh operation feed into heating Swedish hospitals and schools, and supporting other public services.

Would that Wales benefited similarly. Instead, the country draws a pittance relative to the number and profits of foreign-owned windfarms rooted on Welsh hillsides and offshore. A few maintenance jobs, exceptionally meagre financing of ‘community funds’ compared with companies’ astronomical profits. Behold a cake most disproportionately sliced.

The most recent wind proposal is for a major development near Ponterwyd that would spill down the southern slopes of Pumlumon to include Y Garn, the most southerly of Pumlumon’s summits, with a Bronze Age cairn. All is a special landscape area, part of the largest watershed in Wales, its soils a huge sponge for rainwater and carbon, and there is a site of special scientific interest.

A few environmental drawbacks there, then, but a safe bet for its would-be developers, Norwegian multinational Statkraft and Australian-linked Eco2. And for local economies no doubt the usual financial crumbs.

So what’s to be done to get justice for Wales? An immediate and medium-term solution will be for Cardiff to push hard for a commensurate share of Jeremy Hunt’s 45 per cent windfall tax on the “excess returns” of electricity-generating companies. That levy is scheduled to last until 2028. Time enough for the government to get thinking about longer-term rake-off strategies.