What’s wrong with wind

Seeking a policy to meet its emissions reduction targets, the Westminster government found a populist solution in wind power with its ready-made “clean, green and free” image.

The generation of more electricity each year from ‘accredited’ renewable sources was encouraged by a consumer-funded carrot-and-stick scheme which made wind power very lucrative.

Incredibly, no mechanism was ever envisaged actually to measure emissions cuts: renewables suppliers receive financial rewards whether their technology increases or decreases emissions and whether or not targets are met. Aggressive marketing has since made ‘wind power’ all but synonymous with ‘renewables’.

There are serious doubts about its ability significantly to reduce emissions. Claims are often made that every megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity generated from the wind cuts the equivalent CO2 pollution created by generating a MWh from a coal– or gas-fired power station. This is a fallacy.

With more than 250 proposals in the public domain (most of them already in the consents system), wind-power development in Scotland is out of control. But planning refusals can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The proposals amount to roughly twice our conventional generating capacity. The system is not capable of absorbing even a fraction of these 250 proposals—even the wind industry admits that a secure electricity supply cannot be guaranteed if more than half Scotland’s renewable energy target is supplied by wind power. In fact, many power engineers predict that attempting to meet far less than 20 per cent of demand from wind power could result in blackouts.

Whole swathes of the countryside could be destroyed in the name of environmentalism while the development of technologies more likely to effect genuine emissions-reduction is held back because wind power is so lucrative.

Nor is it easy to see how this will bring any long-term benefit to the rural economy. Local employment consists almost entirely of temporary construction jobs.

A quarter of tourists interviewed in a 2002 VisitScotland survey, when there were only half the current proposals, said they would not return to areas which had wind turbines. Such a drop in tourist income, even in less-popular holiday areas, could be catastrophic.

Some environmental lobbyists think the price is worth paying. A Greenpeace campaigner was quoted as saying * :

“The greatest threat to our precious landscape is posed by the permanent damage that will be caused by climate change.”

His words would be more reassuring if renewables incentives were tied to proven emissions savings.