How Scots were sold a lie on wind power

AS our hills and glens were festooned with more and more wind turbines, Scots were reassured that we were becoming to renewables what Saudi Arabia was to oil.

England would be desperate to buy the green electricity canny Scots had wrested from thin air. Not only that, there was a jobs bonanza into the bargain.

Now those promises seem like so much hot air. For it rapidly became apparent that the fickle wind does not blow when we want to use it to keep the lights on and the kettles boiling. Equally, it often blows too hard at inopportune times.

And so a Byzantine system of payments and subsidies was cobbled together. We pay a premium for the power wind farms produce and we make ‘constraint payments’ to compensate owners when the power they generate is not required.

At sea, things were worse as flagship wave-power firms foundered after millions in taxpayer grants were swallowed up.

This nonsense is unsustainable in a time of post-crash austerity.

We report today that on one day, August 7, a record £3,137,704 was paid out as a swamped National Grid paid for turbines to shut down.

That cost, like so many others in the crazy world of renewables, will ultimately be passed on to the consumer.

The harsh reality is that SNP energy policy is a disaster. Far from selling our power, we are net importers of electricity – a travesty for a country rich in natural resources such as ours.

The wind farms still clutter our oncepristine skylines but their stuttering output is no basis for a national energy programme. And the jobs we were assured would flood in? Another piece of Nationalist fiction.

Beholden to green zealots within their support, the SNP dares not confront the truth. A more accurate description for wind farms would be subsidy farms and the country simply cannot afford them.

Meanwhile, Nationalist opposition to fracking and shale gas is rooted in dogma and not scientific fact.

America is already reaping a genuine bonanza from fracking. There, shale gas provides a cheap, reliable domestic source of fuel for energy generation.

High-tech jobs in the associated engineering abound.

England is gearing up for a similar revolution, boosted by an innovative scheme that will see money from fracking invested to benefit local communities.

Meanwhile the Scottish Government has a fracking moratorium while wedded to a ruinously expensive and ultimately futile green power agenda.