Sunday, 4th September 2011
Time for an honest debate on wind renewables
A version of this article was published in The Sunday Express on 4 September
Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond once famously lambasted those he called the “spivs and speculators” of the financial markets who he blamed for laying low Scotland’s great banking institutions. Now an even more iconic emblem of our nation – our unique landscape – is at the mercy of energy speculators from the renewables industry following the Scottish Government’s decision to target 100 per cent of energy demand from renewables by 2020.
And so the modern day Klondikers and snake oil salesmen of the renewables industry take to Scotland’s hills to make their fortunes with grand plans for forests of gleaming white turbines to replace the trees that so inconveniently impede their progress. All because the Scottish Government is bending over backwards to point them toward ample subsidies and shower them with assurances that their get-rich-quick schemes are righteous in the eyes of venture capitalist and environmentalists alike.
It’s time to have an honest debate about whether that can or should continue.
At present there are around 3,500 turbines operating in the UK with a capacity to generate 5.5 gigawatts of energy. Another 1200 are under construction and around 2000 more have planning permission. A further 3,500 are in the planning pipeline.
That’s a lot of white metal on the horizon, yet all the available evidence suggests that once operational, they are an incredibly inefficient use of resources. Even once all 10,000 of these turbines are up and running, it will not be nearly enough to achieve the UK target of 15% renewable energy by 2020, or the Scottish Government’s even more ludicrous 100% target. To reach these numbers we will need a six-fold increase in giant turbines, or 60,000 of them across the UK, many of them in Scotland.
During a recent meeting of the group, Communities Against Turbines (Scotland) in Ballantrae, Ayrshire, I set out at length the reasons why I would describe the scramble to blanket our countryside with wind turbines a wholesale ‘rape’ of our landscape.
I explained clearly to the audience that I chose this stark word because, according to the Chambers Dictionary, it can mean the violation, despoiling or abuse of a landscape. It was picked carefully, because it so aptly describes the way in which wind turbines violate the principle of fairness in our society.
They transfer vast amounts of money from the poor to the rich via extravagant taxpayer-funded subsidies and ever-increasing utility bills that are justified by the supposed need to build more wind farms. On top of that, they despoil our unique landscape and environment; and through noise, the flicker-effect and vibration, they abuse the health and welfare of people and animals living near them.
To cite one example, this week a public inquiry got underway to deliberate on two sets of proposals to build industrial wind farm developments near the exceptionally beautiful Dava Moor, close to Cairngorm National Park. A blind capercaillie could work out that these proposals would irrevocably damage this sensitive and beautiful area, and so too did Highland Council when its planners rejected the proposals last year. But the developers know that local communities rarely get the final say on these matters, and so we have been treated to the unedifying spectacle of a fresh, ‘definitive’ decision by the Scottish Government’s reporter.
The plight of outraged locals over the Dava Moor proposals has been replicated the length and breadth of Scotland, as the government tries to shoe-horn its renewables policy into a landscape in which it simply doesn’t fit.
Of course we need alternatives to burning more and more fossil fuels. I believe that we can save 75% of the energy we currently use by being more efficient. The Scottish Government’s less impressive climate change target is that it is aiming for a paltry 12 per cent reduction in energy consumption by 2020. Retrofitting our existing building stock cheaply and efficiently with insulation and triple glazing would hugely reduce emissions and provide jobs for thousands in the building sector.
We also need to look to the future and invest much more into developing the new sunrise technologies such as the hydrogen economy. So far, no-one has invented an efficient way to store electricity. But hydrogen, which is the lightest and most abundant chemical element in the Universe, can be readily stored and can provide an effective energy source. In Germany they are building hydrogen powered cars, trains and ferries. Hydrogen powered homes are under construction. We need to cut our dependency on fossil fuels and look to the future.
But until we do, we must not turn our backs on nuclear power. With our remaining nuclear power stations at Hunterston B and Torness nearing the end of their working lives and a large and skilled workforce ready and willing to develop a new generation of nuclear plant, it is perverse to slam the door in their faces. The SNP’s bloody-minded dogma against nuclear will do little more than the ranks of new wind turbines to stop climate change.
The response to my Ballantrae speech was hugely instructive and not a little depressing. Instead of engaging on any of the serious social, environmental and economic points it raised, Sandra White, the SNP’s MSP for the urban Glasgow Kelvin constituency, lodged a motion in the Scottish Parliament expressing “outrage” at my use of the word rape which, she said, was “insulting to all who have been sexually assaulted”.
Presumably Ms White had neither taken the trouble to attend the meeting at which the speech was made, or even read it on my website before she launched this laughable attack. But really, if this sort of deliberate, inane misinterpretation is the level of response from the Scottish Parliament’s government benches to a 3,000-word blow-by-blow argument, we should ask why they can’t come up with something more substantive.
Meanwhile, the evidence against the appropriateness of continued large-scale wind farms stacks up and the Scottish Government dodges the arguments altogether. This simply won’t do: the stakes for our rural communities, landscapes and the environment are just too high.
STRUAN STEVENSON MEP
Struan Stevenson is a Conservative Euro MP for Scotland. He is Chairman of the Climate Change, Biodiversity & Sustainable Development Intergroup in the European Parliament.
