My father, Peter Edwards, who has died aged 90, was a pioneer of wind energy and set up the UK’s first commercial windfarm in 1991.

Peter opened the Delabole windfarm in north Cornwall on land belonging to a farm he had been running since the 1960s. For its first two decades it operated 10 400kW turbines, feeding into the National Grid and generating enough power for nearly 3,000 homes. In 2010 the original turbines were decommissioned and an £11.8m rebuild replaced them with four turbines with a power output of 9.2 megawatts, providing enough for more than 7,800 homes.

Together with his son, Martin, and through their consultancy firm Windelectric Management, Peter also helped dozens of other farmers to negotiate deals with wind turbine operators who wanted to build on their land.

During the 90s he served as a member of the parliamentary renewable and sustainable energy group, was chair of the British Wind Energy Association (1996–98) and chair of the Renewable Energy Association (2002–04). He was also frequently invited to give talks and lectures, including to the World Renewable Energy Congress.

Peter was born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, as the only child of Violet (nee Brooker) and her husband, George. His father was an RAF squadron leader who was frequently posted away from home, so he grew up with his mother at his maternal grandmother’s home on the Isle of Wight, where he attended Ryde school.

When his father was posted to the US, Peter accompanied his parents before returning to the UK in 1955 to study agriculture at the University of Reading. There he met fellow student Philippa Fielding, whom he married in 1958; they had three children: Martin, Jeremy and me.

On graduation in 1959, Peter was appointed as a government conservation officer for the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe), where he completed a two-year contract designing and implementing plans for soil conservation, drainage and water storage. He and his family came back to the UK in 1961 to establish the farm in Delabole, with Philippa as a partner in the business.

As the dairy industry became increasingly difficult to manage, Peter and Philippa decided to sell their herd in 1987 and capitalise on the abundant wind around the north Cornish coast. The investment in turbines was a constructive response to an unpopular proposal for a nuclear power plant at Luxulyan in mid-Cornwall, with the hope of pushing the UK in a greener direction. From 2002 the Delabole windfarm was owned and operated by Good Energy, before GE was bought by the UAE-based company Esyasoft earlier this year.

Throughout its time as a windfarm, the land has continued to produce grass to feed cattle and sheep, and has been planted with around 500,000 native trees on less productive areas. Peter was always a keen practitioner of low-intensity “nature-friendly” farming.

Philippa died in 2021. He is survived by his three children, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.