Jill Stephenson and Andrew Hook
Three things happened last week that were of cataclysmic importance to Scotland. None of them was particularly featured in Scotland’s quality press as we don’t really have one any more. And I mean no disrespect to those who labour trying to keep our press alive.
The first was that on 20 February Alastair Buchanan, the head of Ofgem, announced that there is a very real chance that Britain will not only run out of electricity within the next three years, but that prices for fuel will rise to a level that is ‘politically unacceptable’. Which is a polite way of saying our fuel is going to be so incredibly expensive that people are going to become very angry indeed.
Ten per cent of our power stations are coming off line (as they are too dirty to meet new EU standards). There is nothing being built at present and even if the new gas plants were to be started now they would not be in operation for four or five years…It’s just horrendous serendipity that just as we have a squeeze on our power and turn to gas the global markets have a squeeze.
The second thing that happened was the next day, 21 February, when Straun Stevenson MEP produced his book ‘So much Wind’, a scathing dismissal of the fact that we are building, according to Mr Stevenson, 5,000 wind turbines across the face of Scotland not one of which will reduce our carbon footprint at all. Now I did not like this book. It is badly written, many of the demi facts are shamefully duplicitous in their misrepresentation and his hyperbole would almost be funny if he wasn’t writing about the nightmare crisis that is about to hit Scotland.
But you have to take him seriously. After all, here we have the highly respected president of the European Parliament’s climate change, biodiversity and sustainable development intergroup telling us that every single one of the expected 5,000 turbines that are to forest Scotland are a total waste of time.
Then on 22 February we had the Holyrood report on the 11-month long investigation into whether the Scottish Government will be able to deliver on their ambitious targets for renewables. It was, as so often the case at Holyrood, excruciating to listen to the low standard of the presentations. If I had heard one more person hesitatingly read out one more accolade of the fine wee eco-projects that had been undertaken at their local primary school whilst Scotland heads for an energy meltdown, I would have screamed.
The theme of the report was smug and complacent. We are on target, we are wonderful and most people in Scotland are delighted at what we are doing. Later I spoke to some of the anti-wind farm protestors in the public gallery and they were in a state of utter despair. I could hardly blame them.
During the last few months I have been driving many hundred miles a week whilst visiting various areas across Scotland where wind farms are being erected, whilst working for a wind farm developer in England – my job being to gauge public reaction to the biggest change in the rural landscape seen in Scotland in the last 200 years. Wherever I go in these places I meet with anger and fury. In every village shop, in every pub, in every meeting place, there is always someone in a state of acute anxiety as the forest of turbines appear like mushrooms that grew in the night, often in spite of the rejection of local planning authorities.
I am, in principle, a supporter of wind energy and I am certainly not a supporter of the theories developed in Struan Stevenson’s book. I am also not a supporter of what I am seeing in Scotland at present, one of the greatest political scandals of my lifetime as the poor of our nation are milked in the interest of the wealthy as they are made to pay huge taxes on their warmth in the interests of the rich.
I want to see hundreds of turbines across Scotland. I think that if they are correctly sited and financed they could be of major benefit to our land and people. But I want to see them in the right places and producing money not as is so often the case for foreign investors but for the local communities whose landscapes they are so often polluting.
Here is my prediction, and remember you heard it first in SR. I believe that the immense power, wind turbine and social injustice crisis that we are going to be seeing sweeping across Scotland in around two years time as prices soar, the lights go out on a frequent basis and people gaze in wonderment as inefficiently-sited wind turbines rise across the landscapes that they once loved,
will be Alex Salmond’s poll tax. Of course you might well want to ignore this warning and turn on the television. Go ahead. Enjoy it while you still can.
As for myself, I am off to the attic to look out my paraffin lamp and I intend buying a bigger wood-burning stove. And I’m not joking.
Maxwell MacLeod is an author and journalist
