By John Constable, Energy Editor, Global Warming Policy Forum
There is hardly a Munro left in Scotland from which you cannot see a wind
farm. In recent years the landscape has been transformed by enormous turbines.
These structures are more than 100 metres (330ft) in height and when many
are clustered together, they are highly visible even from great distances.
People who choose to live in the wild areas of rural Scotland do so for a
reason: because they love it. Those who go walking in these places feel the
same.
They find them beautiful, and they’re sensitive to the landscape and to
visual intrusion. Many are upset by the large number of turbines that have
been erected.
Wind farms have a huge impact on the local environment, and not only
visually. From surprisingly far distances people can hear them and the
noise they make is peculiar and intermittent – it wakes them up at night
and they can’t get back to sleep. Wind farms do not make good neighbours.
They are often constructed in areas where there are no roads, meaning these
have to be created, sometimes on peat.
This leads to real concerns over the balance of damage and benefit – the
benefits of low emissions energy on the one hand, yet the damage to the
local environment on the ground, and whether that is really justified.
Almost all of the UK’s wind farming is concentrated in Scotland, because
the Scottish Government is not listening to the objections of the residents
who have to live near these sites.
Because so much of the Scottish population is concentrated in urban areas,
however good the environmental arguments made by local objectors are, there
simply aren’t enough voices for the SNP in Edinburgh to care. The simple
truth is that this is political statistics.
So it is perhaps not surprising that the Scottish Government’s new energy
strategy is planning an expansion of the number of turbines.
The Government has accepted a lot of the spin coming out of the wind farm
industry without being sufficiently sceptical. They’ve
swallowed it all hook, line and sinker. Energy Minister Paul Wheelhouse
continues to say that onshore wind is the lowest-cost form of new
generation energy, but this is simply not true.
Onshore wind is generally extremely expensive in comparison to electricity
from conventional sources, particularly combined cycle gas turbines.
It is well known that the subsidy and system costs of existing wind farms
put them well above the cost of other forms of energy. Subsidies in the UK
for renewables in total now come to about £7billion per year.
You’re taking money – in other words, resources – from elsewhere in the
economy and giving it to wind generators.
By redirecting resources towards the wind sector, you are suppressing
activity in other parts.
So you may have created jobs in the wind sector but how many jobs have you
destroyed in other fundamentally economic activities?
The costs for all forms of wind are high. The farms require more grid and
special operations of the grid system to keep it balanced. These costs are
not small.
When you add it all up, the total cost to the consumer of a unit from a
wind farm is considerably higher than that from a conventional generator.
So how is the Scottish Government going to pay for these new plans?
In the autumn Budget, the Chancellor said there would be no new subsidies
for wind turbines – indeed all renewables – until 2025 at the earliest.
With new sites, wind farm operators will sometimes say they don’t require
subsidies, but that remains to be seen.
This suggests to me, then, that the SNP is either hoping for a change in
policy, or it is being deliberately vague in its ambitions. Does it believe
any of this?
If all these turbines were to be built, the Government faces another
problem: an enormous expansion of the grid to serve them. You need an awful
lot of wire to get wind from the wind farms to the interconnectors that
serve the grid.
As Scotland knows from the controversial Beauly to Denny power line, this
is not an easy thing – it’s expensive and ugly – and someone has to pay for it.
A few people may well benefit from the further expansion of wind turbines
in Scotland – land owners and wind farm operators, perhaps – but it is
unlikely to be the Scottish people.
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