YOUR VIEWS: Renewable energy in the Highlands and leaving the car at home
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Benefits from renewables should grow
The Highlands is becoming the home to a significant percentage of Britain’s green energy needs. Even before wind, our post-war hydro dams made the Highlands 100 per cent self sufficient in electricity.
Since then a plethora of wind farms have been erected, close to home is a 100MW hydro scheme at Glendoe and exploratory work has started at Coire Glas just south of Invergarry for a 1.3GW pump storage power station, with another being proposed on Loch Laggan.
In 2021, Scottish Government minister Angus Robertson described Scotland as the ‘Saudi Arabia of renewables’. Part of this is true, utility companies and infrastructure funds from around the world are rushing to spend billions in the Highlands, and when the wind blows Scotland is self sufficient in electricity and we export to England. Highland-generated renewable electricity is a multibillion-pound industry already.
Billion-pound oil businesses in Saudi Arabia, Texas or Aberdeen generate massive boosts to the local economies. For a while the Porsche dealership in Aberdeen was the most successful in Britain. The problem is that our electricity revenue doesn’t stay in the Highlands, indeed much, perhaps most, ends up abroad. As well as Spanish-owned Scottish Power, and Scottish and Southern Energy, developers include Fred Olsen, German-owned RWE or JP Morgan. The turbines are made by Siemens of Germany, Vestas of Denmark or GE. Even the companies that service the turbines are often from outwith Scotland.
In 2014, the Scottish Government issued ‘guidance’ that developers pay £5000 per installed megawatt (with inflationary increases), with the money to be distributed within 30 miles of wind farms. So a wind farm of 10 medium sized 2.3MW turbines generates £115,000 per year for their local community should the developer choose to follow Scottish Government guidance.
There are many problems here: firstly, the electricity price has soared since 2014 to no further community benefit; secondly, energy is not ‘devolved’ to the Scottish Government, so ‘guidance’ remains optional; thirdly, hydro/pump storage is not included in guidance; and lastly, the 30-mile diameter distribution means that some communities do very well, while a neighbouring village loses out.
In December last year as a Highland councillor, I proposed a motion at the Highland Council that five per cent of the gross revenue from newly commissioned renewable projects in the Highlands should be paid as community benefit. This was passed and the leader of the Highland Council complimented me on an excellent motion. Since then I have raised it with Scottish MSPs, had it made policy by the Scottish Liberal Democrats, been to see Alastair Jack the Secretary of State for Scotland – all enthusiastic about the proposal. But the wheels of government grind painfully slowly, and more and more wind farms are consented not subject to this five per cent community benefit.
Those living in the Highlands suffer the downside of massive construction works, a landscape covered in turbines and dams, and a web of electricity transmission lines and substations. At the most we are getting a third of our fair share of the revenue. We suffer an exodus of our young, poor infrastructure, poor public services and fuel poverty. It is only fair that a reasonable share of renewable proceeds stays in the area, legislation now will impact whether the rural Highlands will become prosperous or not.
Angus MacDonald Lib Dem councillor and candidate for Westminster
Leaving the car at home is not realistic
I think your journalist Emma Harrison [Courier, July 4] should try living where we do and she would realise that to commute to work you need a car.
The bus service is expensive and influenced by school terms – my work is not. The A82 is not a cycling or walking route.
Halinka Rands, Braefield
The norm should be that the roads are fit to travel on whatever mode of transport you prefer.
Ann Taylor
Protect jobs by investing in transition
I write in response to a June 27 letter from Clark Cross, of Linlithgow, which asserts that without the continuation of licences for oil exploration in the North Sea, 200,000 jobs will be lost – 90,000 of them Scottish.
For the last five years Extinction Rebellion, Friends of The Earth, the Green Party and other green groups have all been highlighting the need to transition the oil-based workforce to developing renewable energy.
The UK government target is to be 100 per cent carbon neutral by 2050; Scotland aims to do this by 2045 – just 22 years from now. This simply cannot be achieved by continuing to base energy use on fossil fuel production.
Quite apart from the fact the world already has sufficient coal and gas stockpiled to last 40 years, failing to transition to renewables means resigning to global warming reaching two or even three degrees by the end of this century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned this would produce widespread flooding, food insecurity, wildfires, deforestation, famine and the mass movement of people unable to sustain a living in their own countries. We urgently need to act on the IPCC’s call for individuals, companies and countries to reduce their emissions by half every decade between now and 2050 (ie reconsidering how we eat, travel, shop and heat our homes).
The resignation of the UK government’s environment minister Zak Goldsmith due to the cripplingly slow pace of change moving to net zero, emphasises that business as usual won’t do. The livelihoods of people in the oil industry can best be protected by governments, banks and industry investing now in the desperately needed transition.
XR Highlands and Islands and Moray
