Power Shift / Local winds, global storms: the journey of a Shetland wind turbine
One single turbine from the Viking wind farm connects Shetland to global, national and local impacts that are often overlooked. This is the first part of a small series of articles, contributed by Erin Rizzato Devlin as part of our PowerShift project, that investigates the challenges of the transition to net zero taking into account impacts in Shetland, Chile or China.
The Viking Energy Wind Farm stands tall on Shetland’s mainland, transforming some of the world’s most productive wind speeds into clean electricity. With its 103 turbines, the project was expected to become one of the UK’s most productive onshore wind farms, contributing to the country’s net-zero ambitions.
As the Scottish Government scurries to increase the number of wind projects in Scotland, the impacts of the global wind industry are coming under increased scrutiny. Important questions remain on how the renewable sector can be made to address inequalities and negative impacts that is usually associated with the fossil fuel industry.
Here, a single Viking turbine illustrates the connections between Shetland’s largest wind farm and supply chains in the so-called ‘global south’.
Anatomy of a turbine
Consider a typical Viking wind turbine, let’s call it Eyvind the Tall. This is made by Vestas, a Danish company operating in over 80 countries and is constituted by five main components: a tower, three blades, a nacelle, a hub and a drivetrain.
The tower alone is 90m tall – five times the height of the Sumburgh lighthouse. The blades capture the wind’s energy and convert it into electricity, while the nacelle contains the turbine’s internal components, including a drivetrain and control system.
As the demand for renewable energy is increasing, the need for critical minerals including cobalt, lithium and rare earths is also growing. For our turbine Eyvind, rare earths are only used in the tower, but they are generally needed for permanent magnets located in turbines’ generators.
Rare earths are a group of 17 elements that have similar properties – they are fluorescent, conductive and magnetic, becoming particularly useful for high-tech applications such as wind turbines. Despite their name, rare earths aren’t so ‘rare’, but they are often found in low concentrations and mixed with radioactive elements, making them especially harmful to extract for people and environments.
An average onshore turbine of the size of Eyvind (4.2MW) requires around 12 tonnes of copper, 1,693kg of nickel, 23 tonnes of zinc and 16 tonnes of silicon, metals which are extracted at least 3,480 miles away from Shetland. An offshore turbine of the same size requires around one tonne of rare earths: a typical car uses little more than 0.2kg.
A recent report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that demand for lithium is expected to increase fivefold by 2040, while graphite and nickel demand is set to double. Cobalt and rare earths are also expected to grow by 50-60 per cent by 2040.
Global transition, translocal costs
The industrial shift to renewables is evident in many places across the Highlands and Islands where wind farms are changing local landscapes. The pressures to mine more critical minerals to fuel the green transition in Scotland comes with particularly serious implications for people and landscapes further afield.
A turbine such as Eyvind, for example, is the product of supply chains that cross the entire planet: each of these materials are extracted, processed and refined in different countries, before becoming the turbine that now stands in Shetland’s central mainland.
Today, the sites of extraction of these transition minerals are highly concentrated in a small number of mineral-rich countries, leading to risks of political instability and geopolitical tensions, as well as environmental and human rights violations.
For example, in Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), sexual abuse and forced evictions of local people have been reported in relation to cobalt and copper mining where thousands hack metal with their bare hands.
In Xinjiang, China, Uyghur people are forced to work in solar panel factories while the minority group is being persecuted and imprisoned in ‘re-education’ camps so the state can seize the region’s natural resources. Unison reports that up to 97 per cent of solar panels could be made with materials extracted by Uyghur workers.
In Chile, excessive lithium extraction is leading to the Atacama salt flat sinking due to a process called ‘brine extraction’, where the metal is accessed by bringing underground lithium-rich fluids to the surface and reducing the soil’s permeability.
While these issues may appear distant from our turbine Eyvind, they are nonetheless linked to its journey as the manufacturer Vestas relies on over 1,200 suppliers across the world and has no processes for engaging with supply chain workers or their representatives directly.
End-to-end visibility is a challenge as global supply chains involve numerous levels of sub-contractors within each company, making it extremely difficult to count the number of people, or companies, involved in the creation of one turbine.
While governments in the Global North attempt to ‘onshore’ the production of these minerals to decrease dependence from Chinese supply chains, transferring mining from the Global South to the Global North misses the point.
Dr Hyeyoon Park, international politics lecturer at Stirling University, explains: “Although Western companies declare clean reports, we cannot really trust them as many standards are voluntary and don’t consider subcontractors. These cannot tell us what is actually happening to workers and vulnerable people in the local community.”
She continues: “Even though minerals are produced in Indonesia or DRC, they are all gathered in China for refining: when we consider the huge amount of energy and heat used, this process is not carbon neutral at all.
“So it’s quite ironic that Western countries try to meet net zero goals with more wind farms and solar panels, while in other parts of the world emissions increase. Without seeing this complex picture, we cannot say that turbines in Scotland are truly net zero.”
Winds of change
As worker’s rights violations and deaths, environmental damage and land violations have increased in 2024 from previous years, the question of how these harms can be addressed becomes increasingly urgent, highlighting the need to ensure better value chain regulation and fairer industrial futures in the Global North and South alike.
A recycling revolution is also needed to make the energy transition truly sustainable, but there is a lack of political measures to make this standard practice. ‘Urban mining’ for example, is a way to recycle critical materials by recovering concrete, pipes or electronics from cities’ waste. Scientists have also proposed ways to recycle turbine magnets, reducing waste and minimising pressure on sites of extraction.
Recycling turbine parts is not so distant from reality: a wind farm in Moray has been supporting a circular economy for almost 40 years. The community-owned Findhorn Wind Park, in fact, includes one of the first turbines in Scotland to be purchased second-hand in 1989. In 2022, the community bought a Vestas turbine that was being taken out of service, refurbishing the nacelle, blades and hub.
“We had to go second-hand because there weren’t new turbines being made at the height we needed, as we were close to an RAF base,” says project manager, Duncan Easter. “One of our turbines lasted 27 years before it was bought and refurbished by someone else, so it’s now somewhere in the south of Italy.”
Though a small-scale example, this highlights a mindset that can be scaled-up to minimise at least some negative effects of global supply chains, providing alternatives to business-as-usual practices that merely extract from local people and landscapes, be they in Shetland or beyond.
“Maybe when Scottish communities will read this story, they will build a translocal coalition or partnership with other local communities in Indonesia or Chile to create better environmental and social transnational solutions,” Dr Park concludes.
“One single community cannot do this alone – translocality is crucial for making more of the just transition.”
This article is part of The Power Shift – a collaborative investigation by 10 independent, community-based publishers across Scotland, including Shetland News, exploring the impact of the green energy transition on communities.Co-ordinated by the Scottish Beacon and supported by the Tenacious Journalism Awards, the project aims to amplify local voices, facilitate cross-community learning and push for fair, transparent energy development.
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