Fans of wind turbines aka ‘rotating cash machines’ should be playing in panto

Stifling the urge to scream “we told you so” to the policy makers in Holyrood who have permittedthespearingof thousands of subsidy-sucking giant wind turbines across our beautiful country, I hope they will now sit up and take notice of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland, which is warning of a potential catastrophe.

We face blackouts because those who should know better have over-deployed on a weather-dependent energy, leaving us all at severe risk from power failures. These politicians have naively and shamefully swallowed the wind industry spin (pun intended) and propaganda and let them construct forests of rotating cash machines that give us no energy security and almost certainly do not save any significant emissions.

They have allowed millions of Co2-absorbing trees to be hacked down and acres of ancient carbon-holding peat to be ripped up to facilitate a greedy and ruthless industry. While they wax lyrical about industrial wind turbines and Scotland being the windiest place in the EU they fail to note that is why we (the consumer) have spent nearly half a billion pounds to wind operators to turn their machines off when there is low demand – especially in spring and autumn.

When there is no wind we are happily importing vast amounts of electricity from England to keep our lights on, people safe and industry running but the likes of WWF, energy “advisors” to the Scottish Government, fail to mention that inconvenient truth in any of their wind industrybacking press releases.

The Scottish energy policy is a farce and not fit for purpose and the lack of certainty of electricity supply confirms it. Those supporting further wind deployment would be better employed in panto this Christmas, making us laugh at their pointless antics instead of making us sit in the dark, cold and weeping at their encouraged destruction of our landscapes from monstrous turbines, the pylons they require, sprawling “substations” and hundreds of miles of access tracks.

Darach Brae, Beauly