Who benefits?

Gina Hanrahan, for the WWF, calls for continued installation of wind turbines in Scotland, claiming that “renewables are working” and that wildlife, people and the land benefit (Perspective, 24 October).

On the next page, Celia Hobbs’s letter details the damage to the Scottish landscape from these windmills, asking whether any factor at all would deter the Scottish Government from permitting an installation.

Substantial local objections usually go unheeded; urban Scots, the great majority, support the turbines as a useful source of “clean” power, but do not have to live near them.

Objectively, present day windpower-generated electricity is a vastly costly example of “virtue signalling,” without such advantages as helping employment, UK manufacturing or even the ofsetting of global climate changes by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which are, anyway, negligible, as are, almost, the amounts and timing of electricity generation.

One must question the WWF’S motivation in supporting renewables, the only real beneficiaries at present of wind turbines being politicians seeking to influence the gullible and those making money, such as developers, foreign manufacturers and landowners.

Does the WWF benefit financially? Gina Hanrahan does not tell us.

CHARLES WARDROP Viewlands Rd West, Perth