Former Minister calls for 'community cable' to Skye
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Former Western Isles MP and Scottish Office Minister Calum MacDonald has called for the new replacement cable from Skye to Harris to be expanded and made a “community cable”, when it is replaced following the disastrous break in October.
Mr MacDonald, who is the developer and manager of the Point and Sandwick community wind farm on Lewis, is calling for all the capacity on a new cable to be ringfenced for the output from local community-owned wind farms.
The former Labour party MP said: “With all the island wind farms being forced to close down and all the power for the next 12 months coming from old diesel power stations, the total financial cost is around £30 million.
“But with a bit of imagination and a joint effort from government at all levels, local, Scottish and UK, the islands can emerge from this stronger by literally building back better.
“Instead of a like-for-like replacement cable to Skye and the mainland, we need a much bigger cable that can boost the community sector by easing the grid bottleneck that has been stifling development for years.
“In 2017, Point and Sandwick Trust commissioned a study into the Skye cable which showed it could be expanded to provide an extra 100 MW of capacity at a cost of £70 million. Given the £30 million cost of the this year’s cable disaster, that would seem to be a bargain.
“Access to this extra capacity should be reserved for local, community-owned wind farms and not gobbled up by large corporate developers. In that way the benefits to the local economy and local communities can be maximised.
“We have the largest cluster of community wind farms in the UK and we can make it bigger if we make the new Skye cable a ‘community cable’. There is no practical or financial reason why it cannot happen but it will require all of local and national government to work with the community sector to deliver. It is simply too big an opportunity for the islands to miss.”
