Price to be paid

Alex Salmond has long boasted about the number new jobs that would be created by his vision of “100 per cent electricity from renewables by 2020”.

A study commissioned by the UK government has estimated that the expansion of the number of wind turbines across the UK could lead to far fewer jobs than the SNP Government has promised.

At present 8,600 people are employed by the onshore wind industry.

Based on a doubling of the wind power output from 4,500 gigawatts to 10,000 gigawatts by 2020 the numbers employed will only increase by 89 to 8,689.The majority of these jobs are held by foreign engineers, foreign workers using foreign steel and foreign turbines.

How many British people are employed?

The huge subsidies paid to the renewables industry destroy jobs. For every “green” job created 2.2 were lost in the real economy.

Subsidies are bleeding us dry and numerous politicians have started to question the huge cost for negligible emissions savings.

Dr John Constable, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, neatly summed it up: “The renewables sector is largely an expensive, unaffordable, government job creation scheme”.

Clark Cross

Springfield Road

Linlithgow