We should ALL be up in arms at the grotesque betrayal of rural Scotland in the name of green energy

THE city dwellers among us may be slow to notice it. We’re better at noticing things like potholes and hollowed-out high streets and food delivery riders taking over our pavements.

But rural Scotland is in revolt. It is of an order well beyond the impatience or irritation I experience in my daily interaction with my urban environment. This is rage.

This is a visceral emotion with a physical dimension – shooting up the arms and into the hands and fingers and turning them into fists. Realising that you have been grievously wronged and the transgressor is impassive does that to a person.

Suffering

In the past couple of weeks I have spoken to people who admit to being able to think of little else but the harm that has been done to them. Their personal lives are suffering. The battle for what is right threatens to consume them. A cloud of wretchedness has obscured their rural idyll and they fear it will never shift.

We tend to associate the countryside with lower levels of stress. People move there to put green fields between them and the rat race. The pastoral vistas are reputed to soothe the soul. I burn to try it someday, but not in Scotland.

It has long been apparent that rural life lies beyond the horizon of Scottish Government understanding. It is observable in the lack of urgency to dual the A9, Scotland’s deadliest road, and in the anti-car agenda.

It was glaringly obvious in last year’s abortive attempt to hive off great chunks of West Coast fishing grounds as Highly Protected Marine Areas, threatening island economies and destroying a key export market.

You can see it in the ongoing ferries scandal. It is there in the rise of greenwashing – where prime agricultural land is sold off to companies atoning for their carbon sins by using forestry grants to plant trees where crops could be growing.

The perception from the countryside is of urbanite busybodies, lattes in hand, wreaking untold damage with their biros on ways of life which are alien to them and therefore expendable in the name of ideology.

To rural people, it is not they who are remote but the government in Edinburgh. They bristle at the centralisation of decision making and point out that, even as the SNP fights to wrest power from London, so it withholds power from its own citizens.

Protest all you want about that planning application which fills you with horror. Persuade your local authority to block it. If the Scottish Government wants it to happen, it will happen.

But nothing exemplifies the callous disregard for rural Scotland as shamefully as ministers’ blithe assertion that our nation will be one of the world’s major exporters of wind energy. It has lately become a mantra alongside similarly idiotic phrases such as ‘unlocking Scotland’s green potential’.

Masterplan

The idea is we have discovered this precious natural resource – much as we discovered oil in the North Sea in 1970, only better – and now we must harness it and stake our economic future on it.

News flash: wind blows in other parts of the world too. It blows, for example, in England – the biggest customer earmarked in Scotland’s wind export masterplan.

In the course of a detailed investigation for this newspaper into the wind industry, I came across reams of jawdropping data.

Off the Moray coast there is a wind farm which regularly pockets more than £1million a day for standing idle. Consumers pay in their bills for it to do so. So far we have shelled out more than £1.5billion in constraint payments for Scottish wind farms’ turbine blades not to turn.

But the most salient data is much easier to grasp than the labyrinthine process whereby wind farms profit from their frequent spells of redundancy. It is the fact that we already have much more wind energy than Scotland is ever going to need.

It was in 2022 that renewables first generated more power than Scotland used and, when the news came out, ministers gave themselves a clap on the back.

Today the generation capacity of our existing wind farms stands at three times the nation’s electricity usage. It will be six times when all the facilities which have been green-lighted are up and running. Think about that when you hear householders such as Aileen Jackson report that her East Renfrewshire property is now ‘surrounded’ by giant turbines. What is this for?

Think about it when renewable energy firms boast that their latest monster installation in Scotland can alone deliver electricity to more than a million homes. Really? Aren’t these homes already covered by existing turbines?

If you are a rural dweller, turn it over in your mind when you learn of the next planning application for a wind farm in your own vicinity. The purpose of this facility in a land which already produces more wind than it needs is what, exactly?

It would be egregious enough if it were merely the excess turbines which were destroying the fabric of the landscape. In the scheme of things, they are the more palatable part of the equation.

On the other side of it is the infrastructure required to transmit all this electricity where it needs to go – and, as the proliferation of wind farms across the country continues apace, we know well that it doesn’t need to go to Scotland.

We are talking about pylons up to 200ft tall carrying highvoltage power lines, substations stretching over hundreds of acres and plummeting property values for anyone living close to them.

‘We are being sacrificed,’ said one Aberdeenshire owner in the way of Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks’ planned Kintore to Tealing power line.

And the scandal of it is the Scottish Government is content to do it. Whether through cynicism or stupidity – I struggle to identify which – it is prepared to throw its own people under a bus in pursuit of its wind export dream.

Ministers have elevated one natural resource which is available almost everywhere – wind – above another which exists nowhere else on earth – our stunning landscape – and they want to tell you what a great job they’re doing.

Bottlenecks

In the circumstances, is it any wonder that the countryside seethes with contempt for the urbanite elites running the Holyrood show?

And is it any wonder that global players such as Amazon and Google now see Scotland as a soft touch where they are welcome to erect their turbines, contribute further to bottlenecks in the National Grid, rack up constraints payments and tell the world they’re helping to save the planet?

‘It is a scandalous mess,’ renewables expert Dr John Constable tells the Mail.

Most depressingly of all, it will only get messier – and costlier for bill-payers, and more intolerable for those invaded by turbines and pylons waved through by a government which says the more the merrier.

Is there any kind of endgame? How much wind is too much? Is the export market really out there? Why, if it’s such a lucrative wheeze, are other windy countries not following suit?

I have seen nothing resembling answers.