Forres gets Wind Farm
The Berry Burn windfarm at Forres has been approved, with coverage at the BBC and Press and Journal.
Previous coverage at the Forres Gazette shows local resitance, and that this is the first of seven on-going wind farm projects around Dava Moor.
My initial reaction is that anyone who objects about wind farms being developed is that they are simply ignorant and narrow-minded – we have spent a couple of centuries polluting Britain, and objecting to wind farm development is like objecting to any form of visibility to the cost of our energy-hungry culture.
Bottom line is that our western lifestyle makes us inherently polluting, and while steps to reduce this may be more visible, I would rather have less pollution through more visible energy creation – than try and live with heads in the sand by allowing the status quo to continue, on the grounds that it’s acceptable so long as most of the pollution is in someone else’s back yard.
And yet – reading the objections in the Forres Gazette, they actually sound quite intelligent. Lack of “joined up planning”, especially with regards to flood defence schemes is brought up.
Considering the lack of “joined up planning” in Nairn, I can far more easily sympathise with such objections.
After all, they are a far cry from objections raised in Hull a few years ago when I used to live there – wind farms were regarded as “dangerous”, with some people fearing that rotor blades would come flying off, travel hundreds of yards near country roads, threatening personal safety. What a bunch of idiots.
It’s therefore nice to see the arguments become more sensible and practical, and that – at least locally – the debate about wind farms is based not as to whether wind farms are right or wrong, but instead, whether the planning process is taking proper account of pertinent issues in context with planning.
In the meantime, Dava Moor is a beautiful place, but I doubt I’ll be sorry to see wind mills dotting the landscape, if it means that Scotland is less polluting. However, whether that development happens in an intelligent or haphazard manner remains to be seen.
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6 Responses to “Forres gets Wind Farm”
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Just polluting the visual instead. Cost of putting these up is an environmental disater.
Much better to pollute our rivers and air instead?
I’m slowly working through David MacKays book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, which gives one of the few quantitative analyses of the energy debate. Well worth the effort – you can even download it for nothing at…..
http://www.withouthotair.com/
The local zeal for windfarms is as depressing as the naivety of those who believe that they will significantly diminish atmospheric pollution.
Of course it is politically and practically easier to put turbines up in open and sparsely populated areas of natural beauty than in those more densely-populated parts of the country where the demand for power is highest, but where vast tracts of land are less easily available and where ‘nimby’ objections would be overwhelming. But wind turbines are still among the least efficient methods of generating electricity (the conversion rate is miserable, and they are unable to respond to demand-levels.)
So what is behind the enthusiasm for wind farms? The government has set targets for the proportion of electricity generated by “renewables”; and to achieve them it has allocated huge subsidies for wind-turbines (and selected other technologies like wave-power), which make a nonsense of any rational moves towards an economically-sustainable energy future. Result: an unholy alliance based on greed. Turbine-makers want the subsidies, and the big landowners want the profit.
Meanwhile, what of the most sensible alternative/renewable/sustainable energy generation option for the Highlands… hydro power? There is still huge scope for more hydro power – in lochs and dams which won’t be visually intrusive, won’t add to atmospheric pollution, will be efficient and flexible power-producers, and will actually offer other environmental and recreational benefits as well. Sadly, there seems to be precious little incentive for utilities to prioritise new hydro capacity.
And of course a credible energy policy would achieve a great deal more if it got serious about tackling consumption. Serious improvement in the construction and insulation of buildings would save vast amounts of currently-wasted energy. Far more energy is lost as heat into the atmosphere than is likely to be provided by all the windfarms in the country.
Yes, it is indeed joined-up planning that we need.
What you really want to read is
“The Wind Farm Scam”
by John Etherington, only £6.49
For scam it is. We’ll still end up having to go the nuclear route when we realise that wind power has not answered the problems and we’re on the verge of power loss. By that time the greedy will have got our money and doubtless changed their business names; gone out of business; taken early retirement &c so will not have to clear up their mess when it comes time to decommission their windmills – and we’ll be landed with all these defunct wind power stations decorating the land like a bad dose of smallpox as well nuclear power!
I think we’ll certainly see a situation in future where there is a greater emphasis on distributed generation of energy – not least through most homes having a small renewable sources, such as solar panels, etc.
The problem remains, though, that for large scale energy production you cannot build easily within cities.
Renewable sources may not be very energy efficient, but neither is coal or nuclear when you look at them – the difference being that renewable sources do not run out of fuel anyway – and certainly don’t require anywhere near the same degree of pollution control that burning fuel requires.
Wind farms aren’t a magic bullet – they are a necessary step in the right direction.
We’ve lived with cheap and easy energy for too long, and only now are realising the true cost of that to our planet.
It’s time to wean ourselves off that – even if that means we’re more likely to see wind turbines in the local countryside, as opposed to power stations in someone else’s.