GEORGE Baxter’s article gushing over Andy Burnham’s “zero carbon” vision (“Onshore wind blows strong to help cut bills and create jobs”, The Herald, August 8th) is no more than a long-winded bedtime story for green energy zealots. As a director of Greenpower, can he be taken seriously?
He celebrates a “modest” 6-8% return on investment for pension funds and £110m in business rates, while neatly glossing over where the real treasure goes. The vast majority of Scotland’s wind infrastructure is owned by foreign, multi-national utilities. He points out that “no corporation or aggressive nation state can control the wind and the sun. It is in all of our backyards”. Well, I hate to tell him but we can’t control it either but foreign boards of directors certainly control the profits, which are exported far faster than electricity.
The author dismisses critics as the “People’s Front of Net Stupid Zero,” yet fails to answer the ultimate comedic riddle: if wind energy is so miraculously cheap, why do Scottish consumers – living in the literal shadow of these turbines – continue to endure some of the highest standing charges and fuel poverty rates in Europe?
Brushing off eye-watering constraint payments as a minor glitch is another flight of fancy. Paying wind farms millions of pounds of public money to switch off because the grid cannot cope is a structural failure, not a “childish attack” by sceptics and until affordable, grid-scale storage magically appears, this remains an expensive, intermittent system masked by grand rhetoric. The wind and sun might be free, but the bill-payer is being taken for a very windy ride.
Aileen Jackson, Scotland Against Spin, Uplawmoor
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