Denying communities a voice over windfarms risks killing progress on net zero – Alistair Carmichael

Many in rural Scotland feel like they are getting a raw deal from local windfarm developments (Picture: Andrew Harnik) | Getty Images

The beatings will continue until morale improves. That is how increasing numbers of people in rural Scotland feel about the march towards net zero. The problem lies within our planning system. Decisions are made at the centre where big energy companies play the system to their own advantage.

Last Saturday morning, the Shetland Association of Community Councils called a meeting to discuss this. It brought in something well north of 100 people, with more online. Speaker after speaker vented the same frustration.

The people who have to live amongst the turbines or alongside the pylons are those most marginalised and ignored. Yes, they are consulted but few feel listened to or heard.

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Massive changes to our landscape

Each application is considered on its own, and it feels like no one considers the fact that the same thing is proposed for another community a few miles down the road. Developers rarely level with communities at the start about the full extent of what is planned.

They may tell you about the turbines when they start but no one talks about the pylons and the sub-stations until the plans have taken on unstoppable momentum. Anyone wanting cables to be put underground is told that the cost will be prohibitive. Cast an eye over the profit and loss account of any big energy company and you can understand why communities are sceptical.

In Shetland, home to one of the largest onshore windfarms in the country, the situation is particularly acute. Having seen massive changes to our landscape, we are now told that more must follow. In an island community with eye-watering levels of fuel poverty, the energy giant SSE was paid £9 million last year not to generate electricity that local people could use to heat their homes.

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The problem is not unique to Shetland. Across rural Scotland, a similar story is heard.

For those of us who want to see the net zero goals delivered, it is also a frustrating and dispiriting experience. It poses a fundamental question.

Can our net zero ambitions be realised if the vehicle for them relies on corporates who preach social responsibility while practicing old-fashioned corporate greed? Talk of “community benefit” to local people and you will, at best, get a raised eyebrow or a weary sigh.

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Marginalised communities

It does not have to be this way. Since the 1970s, the Northern Isles have hosted the oil and gas industry and done rather nicely from it. The community benefit payments from wind farms, by comparison, look like beads handed to the natives.

How much longer can we go on like this? I would not like to say it, but as a network of energy and water-hungry data centres are rolled out across the countryside, I fear it will not be long before the worm turns.

This is the moment to acknowledge where it has gone wrong. We need to pause the process and start it only when we have a planning system that respects rather than marginalises our communities. Carrying on regardless is a recipe for failure in a climate war that we cannot afford to lose.

Alistair Carmichael is the Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland