Last month, over 50 community councils in Highland Scotland, representing around 75,000 people, gathered for a meeting on the future of wind turbines and energy pylons. In an unprecedented course of action, the convention of community councils released a unified statement calling for a moratorium on all new developments until an agreed national energy policy is in place.
Put simply, I agree fully.
This is not an issue limited to the Highlands. We are seeing the very same happening right now across Perth and Kinross and the rest of rural Scotland.
I joined around one hundred local people at Fowlis Wester Hall for a meeting and it was agreed that a similar strategy should be taken to unite local community groups in opposition to the industrialisation of our countryside. This is no overstatement, and the collective impact of multiple developments in the pipeline across rural Perthshire - including 200m-high turbines at North Logiealmond, Glen Lednock and Meallbrodden – on top of current sites would totally alter the character of the area.
It is increasingly clear that the current framework for community consultation is inadequate and ineffective, not least given the number of applications rejected at a local level, only to be overturned by the Scottish Government in a slapdash pursuit of preconceived national targets.
The current trend is amplifying exactly what is the wrong with the entire process with landowners being offered huge sums of money for the construction of wind farms. But with no coherent national strategy in place, we are seeing hundreds of applications for sites – over 700 in the Highlands alone - without the connected infrastructure of battery storage.
In many rural areas, hundreds of millions are being paid to operators to switch off the turbines to avoid overwhelming the grid because the energy demand is so low in sparsely populated areas and there are no means of transporting the energy elsewhere. Moreover, it is every one of us who is covering this enormous cost of switching the turbines off through our higher energy bills.
Local people are furious because huge decisions are being made with no coherent plan in place, and what we stand to lose in areas so reliant on tourism for livelihoods cannot be bought back by community payback schemes.
The Scottish Conservatives are very clear that this madness of blanketing our hills in turbines must end. No developments should commence until a proper strategy is in place and, most importantly of all, that no further developments will be approved without the expressed consent of the local communities that reside around them.
