Gary Buchan stands outside his home and counts how many wind turbines have sprouted from the moors and hills he can see from his living room window on a clear day.
“…25, 26, 27,” the 53-year-old sighs. “That’s what I can see from my house.”
Completed last week, Viking is one of the UK’s largest onshore wind farms by output, with 103 turbines spread over roughly 50 sq miles of land.
It has also been built in one of the smallest and remotest parts of the country – the Shetland Islands.
Towering over the surrounding landscape, each turbine stands 155 metres tall from base to tip – one and a half times the height of Big Ben.
At the moment, these sleeping giants stand idle, waiting to be switched on – underscoring the state of flux Shetlanders find themselves in as well.
With the local oil and gas industry in decline and a plethora of green energy companies hoping to fill the void, residents are having to grapple with a series of tricky questions about their future.
The islands are the windiest place in the UK, creating enormous potential for onshore and offshore wind farms. Likewise, developers believe brownfield land and ports previously used for oil and gas could be perfect locations for new carbon storage and green hydrogen production sites. Yet the switch to green energy comes with trade-offs, not least the impact on the archipelago’s previously unspoilt landscapes. It has left some residents feeling powerless in the face of seemingly unstoppable developments.
“People are opening their back door, or their curtains, and are faced with masses of turbines,” says Buchan, a fish farm technician and photographer who has spent years picturing the local environment. Read on: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/shetland-islands…/
“People are opening their back door, or their curtains, and are faced with masses of turbines,” says Buchan, a fish farm technician and photographer who has spent years picturing the local environment. Read on: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/shetland-islands…/
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