Highlands face a new clearance in wake of wind farm decisions

Published on Wednesday 3 March 2010 20:07

FAMILIES were driven from the Highlands to make way for sheep during the infamous Clearances.

Now the threat of a Highland landscape devoid of people has arisen again.

But this time it is not the lure of profits from mutton and wool that threatens our unique landscape. It is the steady march of giant wind turbines that will drive away tourists and leave a dwindling population struggling to survive.

The shameful decision by the Scottish Government to approve the Beauly to Denny power line, despite more than 18,000 letters of objection and only 46 letters of support, ran a knife across the throat of democracy and public consultation.

The fact that Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund and the (so-called) Green Party were all supporters of this act of vandalism, lays bare their credentials as environmental saviours.

SNP energy minister Jim Mather tried to justify this environmental catastrophe with weasel words about Scotland becoming a European leader in clean, green energy.

There is nothing clean or green about marching huge steel pylons across mountain landscapes and past some of Scotland's most important historic castles and battlefields.

Jim Mather is the kind of politician who would cut down a native Scots pine, stand on the stump and deliver a speech about conservation, without batting an eye.

No doubt an audience comprised of environmentalists would applaud him wildly.

Europe's biggest wind farm at Whitelee, to the south of Glasgow, has led to a mad dash for onshore wind.

The project covers 22 square miles and includes a 56-mile network of service roads that have clinically dissected Eaglesham moor.

Vast areas of deep peat land have been destroyed by the project, releasing tens of thousands of tonnes of into the atmosphere and ending forever the ability of the bog to act as a natural carbon capture sump.

The stunning landscape at Dava Moor near Grantown-on– Spey is also set to be blighted by a series of wind farms, leading to more peat land destruction and even, in one case, the clearing of a native Scots pine forest planted with government grants only a decade ago.

Kergord Valley in Shetland looks likely to be similarly vandalised, in the face of huge local opposition, as does the Isle of Lewis with the go-ahead given to build 39 turbines, each standing 475ft high.

Many of the turbines at Muaitheabhal on Lewis will be visible from the world-renowned iron age stone circle at Callanish.

Hundreds of planning applications to construct new wind farms are in the pipeline in Scotland. But without massive subsidies in the form of "renewable energy certificates", not a single wind turbine would have gone up in Britain.

The truth is they're not farming wind: they're farming subsidies.

We will not be able to rely on wind for 30 per cent of our power, as the government plans. During the recent cold snap, we experienced widespread high pressure and low wind speeds.

For several days, Britain's wind turbines, said to be capable of delivering 5 per cent of our electricity, delivered only 0.2 per cent.

So far, around 2,500 wind turbines have been erected across the UK and yet they contribute barely 1 per cent of all the electricity we need. Their combined output of around 900 megawatts is less than that of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.

Worse still, far from being free, this trickle of electricity is twice as expensive as nuclear, gas or coal-fired plants, which provide us with 90 per cent of our power needs.

We will need many ordinary power stations to back up wind farms, in the short to medium term, and those are going to be high emitting fossil-fuel gas or coal-fired plants which nobody in the Scottish Government is planning for.

And since the government has already ruled out any new nuclear plant in Scotland, we can be certain of one thing … the lights are going to go out.

&#149 Struan Stevenson is a Conservative MEP. He is a member of the European Parliament's environment committee and president of the climate change, biodiversity and sustainable development intergroup of more than 200 Euro MPs.