Rural dreams shattered... by unstoppable march of the mega-pylons
Angered by the Mail’s revelations about the giant turbines blighting Scotland? Wait until you read about the REST of the project...
WHEN they bought it seven years ago, they hoped it would be their forever home. Now they fear that they will have no choice in the matter – that they will be stuck there.
For now, the dream cottage in rural Aberdeenshire which Sheena Hickey and Chris Webster fell in love with on sight still boasts the same breathtaking views across the unspoiled landscape. But an invasion is afoot.
An electricity substation – one of the largest in the UK – is due to be their new neighbour. A network of overhead power lines will form in the sky above them. They will be held in place by monster pylons up to 200ft tall.
The tranquil paradise, a few miles from Stonehaven where they are raising their five-year-old daughter, is expected to become a colossal electricity junction box and their home is just a few hundred yards from the heart of it.
‘Effectively it will put us in negative equity,’ says Ms Hickey, 42, a geomatics advisor.
She adds: ‘We loved it from the day we first set foot in it. We’ve done a lot of work to our home and we had plans to do more but we can’t carry these out if our house will be worth less than our mortgage.
‘If we could sell it for the price it was worth before all of these plans then we would want to move. Life has just become too stressful now, sitting waiting to hear what plans are being submitted next.’
They are not the only ones who would sell up if they could. The enormous infrastructure project threatening to blight their lives and environment is 66 miles long. It stretches from Kintore, 16 miles north-west of Aberdeen, to Tealing, five miles north of Dundee.
All along the line there is fear, confusion and,
‘Bone-headedly stupid ambition to be Saudi Arabia of wind’
lately, a rising tide of anger. It is directed towards both Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN), the power giant behind the plans, and the Scottish Government, which is widely seen as its enabler.
There is a sense among the affected communities in Aberdeenshire and Angus that they are caught in a gold rush scenario – and worse, their own government is egging on the prospector.
It is, after all, its stated objective to become one of the world’s key exporters of wind-generated electricity – and that is what all these billions of pounds’ worth of infrastructure is for.
Last week the anger deepened as a property consultant spelled out the likely effect on house values of living next to super-pylons carrying 400kV wires carving their way through the countryside.
Ian Thornton-Kemsley, of the Galbraith Group, said homes along the route would devalue by between 10 and 30 per cent.
If you are unlucky enough to be next to a substation – with its attendant fears for health and risk of noise – it is worse.
Ms Hickey says: ‘We have been told to expect a 10-40 per cent drop for the pylons and a bigger hit for the substation.’ Mr Thornton-Kemsley suggests there has been no analysis by SSEN of the number of residential properties affected.
In fairness, such an analysis would be quite an undertaking. For the Kintore to Tealing overhead line is just one of a slew of infrastructure projects planned by SSEN in the next six years.
A 100-mile power line will travel from the hamlet of Spittal in Caithness to Beauly in Invernessshire. From Beauly – fast emerging as Scotland’s northern electricity hub – another line will stretch 120 miles to Peterhead on the Aberdeenshire coast with substations along the way.
In the West, a new line is coming in to link the Isle of Lewis with Beauly. It will be subsea and underground when it hits the mainland at Dundonnell. But a £480million upgrade of the 100mile line between Ardmore on the Isle of Skye and Fort Augustus on the shore of Loch Ness will be overhead. The pylons planned are between 130ft and 150ft high. Somewhat conspicuous, many feel, on a scenic tourist isle. Still overhead power lines scheme is planned in Argyll, with 48 pylons 170ft-200ft high carrying power lines over the unassuming village of Dalmally.
Then there is the upgrading of the already highly controversial Beauly to Denny line, which is described by SSEN as an essential element in the transmission of renewable energy in the UK and in helping Scotland realise its green potential.
Wind power, declared Alex Salmond in his pomp as First Minister, is ‘free’. Its costs, renewable energy experts tell the Mail, are in fact stratospheric.
And, says one, the rush to fulfil the ‘bone-headedly stupid’ ambition of making Scotland the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind’ is costing the consumer still high amounts.
And that, John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) think-tank argues, is before you consider the devastating environmental and quality of life impacts of festooning the landscape with hulking turbines and adding ever more infrastructure to enable them to produce electricity beyond Scotland’s needs.
He says: ‘It is now completely clear that if you are going to build a lot of wind you will have massive expansion of the grid network – you can never have enough because the bottlenecks are just pushed into different places.
‘A lot of expansion is necessary reinforcement in the distribution network as well. You need new substations. It becomes immensely capital intensive.’
Hence the £20billion that SSEN is spending on its present projects in Scotland – all of it, ultimately, to be passed on to consumers in their bills. Across the UK, a furanother
ther £60billion will require to be spent on upgrading the National Grid by 2035.
Much of this will go towards transforming the network into one capable of handling the vast amounts of electricity produced by Scottish wind farms.
Is it money well spent? Scotland currently has the wind farm capacity to produce three times the electricity that it actually uses.
An analysis by independent consultant on renewable energy Dr Chris Ford reveals that capacity will rise to six times the nation’s consumption once all the wind farms which have planning permission are operational. If all those currently seeking permission go ahead, it will rise to ten times consumption.
Dr Ford says: ‘The problem today is you’ve got this very strongly developer-led system and you’ve also got people like the Scottish Government who are encouraging wind power and trying to promote it as much as possible to the point where it’s gone beyond reasonableness.
‘It’s not just the simple numbers of capacity, there physically isn’t enough infrastructure to get the power out of Scotland down to London – and the reality is with the numbers we’re looking at, they’re going to need dozens of these power lines, so there’s the environmental impact of the lines as well.’
It is down on the ground, in communities like Auchenblae in the Aberdeenshire area known as the Mearns, that the impact is felt most deeply. The village sits in the path of the pylons soon to trample through this prime agricultural land and, understandably, residents want to know exactly where they are going. They still don’t have answers.
What they do know is the supersize pylons will be visible from almost every home.
Kate Matthews, who lives in the village and is a co-founder of the campaign group Save Our Mearns, says: ‘We have been sacrificed. There’s no other word for it.
‘It’s not just about the view, it’s about the saleability of the property. I’ve lived there 15 years and it was a red line for me. I would never have bought a home near power lines.
‘We have spent the last ten months campaigning against this because it is just not right to build a project that impacts so heavily on communities without mitigating those impacts properly, i.e. undergrounding it or putting it offshore.’
Uppermost in many minds are the health implications of living next to power lines.
While the UK Government says studies show a possible link between them and childhood leukaemia, some medical experts argue it has not taken enough account of the most recent research. Aberdeenshire-based medical practitioner Dr Jennifer Sudder told STV: ‘In the current scientific literature, there’s a 50 per cent increased risk of cancer for those living long-term near high-voltage power lines.
‘We need to look at the most upto-date research – the risk of exposure to electro-magnetic fields increases the risks for leukaemia and cancers.’
She said the risks were present for adults as well as children, and there was strong evidence for leukaemias and cancer, especially of the breast and brain.
For joiner Chris Webster, who thought he was going to be bringing up his five-year-old in a rural idyll, it is a massive worry.
Instead she will be growing up next to an electricity substation stretching over many dozens of acres at Fetteresso Forest with pylons carrying high-voltage wires feeding into it.
‘She’s going to be near those pylons for the next 16 or 17 years of her life possibly. What are we supposed to do?’
Parents with children at Drumoak Primary School a few miles away wonder the same. The pylons are due to pass by within yards. Kirsty Bailie, who has three children at the school, said the plans were simply ‘horrible’.
She told the Press & Journal: ‘What I don’t understand is, these pylons shouldn’t be near anyone’s dwelling or home or school or village, because they’ll just be so massive. They’ll ruin whatever landscape they’re on, whatever the route is if they’re overhead.’
Residents due to see substations installed near their homes also remain far from convinced by assurances that the noise produced by them will be minimal.
They are well aware of the famous ‘Beauly buzz’ first heard more than a decade ago from the Wester Balblair substation near the Inverness-shire village.
Highland Council served a noise abatement order on Scottish and Southern Electricity after householders complained it could be heard miles away, keeping them awake. Millions were spent on silencing it but it is still there, say locals, only softer.
There is concern among farmers that the vehicles and machinery required to install mammoth pylons and run cables across their land will risk the spread of potato cyst nematode (PCN), a pathogen which would destroy their crops.
And, though SSEN has engaged in dozens of community meetings, persistent accusations of ‘obfuscation’ are levelled at it.
Indeed, one resident of Edzell, Angus, has now made an official complaint to energy regulator Ofgem, claiming the company has breached its operating licence by failing to engage in ‘meaningful consultation’.
The irony for industry observers like Dr Ford is the whole infrastructure project is built on a false prospectus anyway.
He says: ‘The sensible thing is to locate generation reasonably close to demand centres and, across the GB market, that’s London, South-East England, West Midlands and those kinds of locations – and there’s plenty of sea room around England to build offshore wind farms.’
Installing yet more wind farms and infrastructure to transmit their energy in Scotland, he argues, is both environmentally destructive and conducive to higher bills.
For Dr Constable of REF, the strategy is wrong for the SNP Government for these reasons and for its independence agenda.
He says: ‘Independence certainly will not be delivered by wind. The intense integration that is necessary with the English demand centres makes you so dependent on the English economy that independence becomes utterly impossible.
‘You might have notional independence but as a matter of fact you would be getting closer and closer to the English economy necessarily because only the English economy is big enough to pay for all this junk.’
SSEN did not answer questions put to it by the Mail about the ‘Beauly buzz’ or farmers’ fears about PCN.
A spokesman for the company said: ‘The UK and Scottish governments have both set targets for 2030 that include a significant increase in generation from renewable energy. To facilitate this, the independent Electricity System Operator has published a Holistic
Wind farms backed by Amazon and Tesco help add £1.5bn to YOUR energy bills Angry about the march of giant turbines across Scotland? Then read this jaw-dropping of h bi b exposé ‘Promoting it to the point where it’s gone beyond reasonableness’ ‘It impacts so heavily on communities’
Network Design that identifies which transmission projects will be needed to achieve the aims of the two governments. Transmission operators are required to support the delivery of these government policies.’
The Scottish Government said: ‘Scotland has the skills, talent and natural resources in abundance with which to harness clean green energy, and wind power is one of the cheapest. The renewables revolution will be good for jobs and good for our economy – with these benefits being delivered right across the country, including rural and remote areas.
‘We need investment in our grid infrastructure to bring benefits for our workforce, our supply chain, and our regional and national economies.
‘It is also vital the network is resilient in order to ensure our energy security ... and to enable our journey to net zero.’
Meanwhile, for Sheena Hickey and her partner Chris, the worry goes on. ‘Our mental health has not been great,’ she says. ‘It’s affected our physical health too. It’s caused a lot of stress and anxiety and many sleepless nights’ worry about the health implications and the financial burden it may put us into.’
She adds: ‘Our home was our sanctuary. After a hard day’s work, it was relaxing to come home and either look out at the views or spend time in the garden in the evenings.’
The bigger picture, it seems, is Scotland is in the wind energy export business. And some people are simply in the way.