Letter: Danish sound the retreat over wind farms

IN THE ongoing debate over renewable energy, the news that Denmark has pulled the plug on further wind farm developments must have come as a slap in the face to the SNP government in Scotland, who seem determined to cover our unique landscape with giant turbines.

The Danes have said "enough is enough". A growing public backlash against the proliferation of giant turbines across the Danish countryside has led the state-owned Danish energy company Dong to announce that it will abandon future onshore wind farms.

Denmark has long been regarded as Europe's green energy role model, with more wind farms than anywhere else. There are more than 4,000 onshore wind turbines, two-thirds more than Britain, in a country only a fifth our size.

However, the Danish public pay dearly for their green power, with electricity bills almost double those in the UK, due to the generous subsidies provided to renewable energy projects.

But public opposition has reached fever-pitch, with the formation of a new national wind farm opposition group. Now the Danish government has decided to slash handouts to the wind industry.

The Scottish Government should take notice. The climate change zealots will not rest until our beautiful countryside bristles with towering windmills and pylons and is criss-crossed by overhead wires and endless miles of service roads.

Hundreds of planning applications to construct wind farms are in the pipeline. The lure of heavy subsidies and rich profits, all of which must be paid for by the consumer, has united energy companies and landowners in an orgy of environmental destruction.

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. In the cold snap this spring we experienced widespread high pressure and low wind speeds across the country.

For several days, Britain's wind turbines, said to be capable of delivering 5 per cent of our electricity, in fact delivered only 0.2 per cent. If, as the government plans to do, we were relying on wind for 30 per cent of our power, the lights would have gone out.

The wind in Scotland blows enough for windmills only to produce electricity around 27 per cent of the time. So the paradox of building windmills is that you have to build a lot of ordinary power stations to back them up and, in the short to medium term, those are going to be high CO2 emitting fossil-fuel gas or coal-fired plants. The trouble is, such is the fixation with wind power that nobody in the Scottish Government is planning for new gas or coal-fired power stations. Having already ruled out any new nuclear plant in Scotland, we can be certain of one thing: the lights are going to go out.

Wind energy certainly has a role to play in a diverse renewable energy mix, but it must be properly planned and sited.The Danes led the way in onshore wind farm projects and now they are sounding the retreat.

Onshore wind was only ever possible through vastly inflated subsidies, ultimately paid by the consumers. The Danes have discovered that it is a false economy which has driven electricity prices sky-high and ruined their landscape in the process. Let's hope the Scottish Government takes notice before it is too late

STRUAN STEVENSON

Conservative Euro MP for Scotland