Time for windfarm wrangle to move on

Acrossroads is reached this week in a long-running legal wrangle over the Neart na Gaoithe offshore wind project in the Firth of Forth. The RSPB charity has until Wednesday to lodge papers challenging a court refusal to grant them leave to appeal to the Supreme Court the planning approval given by Scottish ministers for the offshore turbine field.

The project has been through the planning process and an exhaustive trail of legal hearings and appeals in the Scottish courts. A decision has been made and it is now time for a resolution.

The tenth anniversary of the launch of the Neart na Gaoithe project is approaching. It is not for the sake of investors that time must be called on the legal process, but for the sake of jobs and investment.

There is a workforce in Dundee that would lap up the jobs that will be created during the construction phase of the project and afterwards in maintenance contracts. Dundee is in pole position to win the work.

The bigger prize, however, would be the marker it would set down for future renewables and decommissioning contracts. The skill-set of the local workforce would be improved but, more importantly, companies in the supply chain would be able to demonstrate with real examples that Dundee, Fife and Angus can deliver on large-scale engineering projects in these sectors.

If the environmental and ecological arguments had not been heard or even arguments over due process then the RSPB would be right to demand a day in court. But they have and it is time to move on.

In the time it has taken the project to wind its way through court, technology has moved on so much that the number of turbines needed for the field has been dramatically reduced.

Perhaps the time and energy of all concerned would be better spent working together to achieve what must be everyone’s twin aims of minimising any potential impact the development could have on the bird population and maximising the human benefit of significant industrial investment in and around Dundee.