Voters are outraged by the unsightly turbines, the loud, low- frequency humming noise that they create and the stroboscopic effects of blades rotating in sunshine.

Opponents are dismayed at the proliferation of the turbines in some of the most beautiful areas of the continent. Conservationists complain that hundreds of birds are killed each month by the rotating blades.

"The dream of environmentally friendly energy has turned into highly subsidised destruction of the countryside," Germany's influential magazine Der Spiegel pronounced last week.

Several governments which once embraced the giant windmills as a way to generate "clean" power are showing signs of having second thoughts.

In France, regional councils have started refusing permission for new turbine developments. Denmark, the world leader in wind technology, is preparing to scale down the number of windmills in the countryside, while Dutch government officials fear that public hostility will force them to shelve plans to expand Holland's wind farms.

Holland had hoped to increase onshore windmill capacity to 1,500 megawatts - enough energy for 1.5 million homes - by 2010.

Wim van der Weegen, a spokesman for the Dutch environment ministry, said: "This is a very densely populated country. Whatever infrastructure you want to put up people will oppose. People say that they don't want it in their backyard. They don't like the look, and they fear interference with their lives."

A Danish plan to scrap 900 existing turbines and replace them with with 175 new windmills has also failed to placate the public. The turbines will produce twice as much electricity between them, but will be taller and noisier, critics say.

Erwin Thorius, president of Denmark's National Association of Neighbours to Wind Turbines, said that people living near windmills found it impossible to sell their homes.

The debate over wind power is particularly fierce in Germany, the world's largest wind power producer with 15,000 turbines and which is committed to scrapping all of its nuclear power stations. Legislation to double the number of wind farms over the next 16 years, approved by the country's parliament last week, has provoked angry protests.

Vast tracts of agricultural land are blanketed by huge wind turbines, many more than 400 feet tall. German residents whose nights are blighted by flashing red lights mounted on the turbine blades to alert aircraft complain about the so-called "disco effect".

Hans-Joachim Mengel, a Berlin University professor who has formed a protest group to fight the extension of wind power in the rural Uckermark region north of Berlin, said: "The turbines are the worst desecration of our countryside since it was laid waste in the 30 Years War nearly 400 years ago."

Botho Strauss, one of Germany's foremost playwrights, who lives in the region, argues: "No phase of industrialisation has caused such brutal destruction of the landscape as wind power."

Resistance is also gathering strength in Britain. Last week Country Life magazine launched a campaign and petition against a relaxation of the planning law proposed by John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, to encourage the development of land-based wind farms in Britain.

Clive Aslet, the magazine's editor, said: "As our continental neighbours have discovered, and we in the UK are quickly learning, the infrastructural costs needed to support wind power generation appear to hugely outweigh the advantages. It provides a trickle of green energy but is against all the principles of sustainable development."

European governments, including Britain, have pushed the development of wind farms in an attempt to increase the proportion of power generated by "renewable" means. The EU has set a target - which no country is likely to meet - of 22 per cent by 2010.

While wind-power enthusiasts claim that France has the potential to increase its production from wind farms a hundredfold, the French public is increasingly hostile. As a result the government is trying to meet its targets by placing turbines offshore, looking for sites along the coasts of Normandy and Britanny, and in the Mediterranean.

Last month, The Sunday Telegraph revealed that proposed Scottish windmills were threatening to push one of Britain's rarest birds, the golden eagle, into extinction. The rapid spread of wind farms in Britain also threatens species including osprey, red kites, merlin and falcons.

There are currently 1,043 turbines on 84 sites throughout the UK, with plans for 959 more to be installed. A spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry, which oversees the energy production, said that Britain would not be deflected from its own aim of producing 10 per cent of power from renewable sources by 2010.

"Regardless of what other European countries do, we firmly believe in this for the future," she said.