‘It’s all money, money, money…’ – community councils demand a pause in large renewable energy projects
Sheeks Aboot Shetland – Episode 16 – with chair of Tingwall, Whiteness and Weisdale Community Council Andrew Archer and Yell resident Jennifer Christie
COULD we be about to witness a sea change in this new era of industrial development that Shetland is experiencing with more wind farms, substations, pylons and both subsea and overground cables being planned around Lerwick, in the north mainland and the north isles?
The recent consultation by SSEN has woken many islanders up to the scale of the plans and left many people feeling they are being “hoodwinked” by the developers.
Now the islands’ community councils are gathering their forces to demand a pause, inviting MP Alistair Carmichael and MSP Hannah Mary Goodlad to join their call for a moratorium at a meeting next month.
“There seems to be this stampede to get as much built as fast as possible when we don’t even have a national strategy,” according to Andrew Archer of Tingwall, Whiteness and Weisdale Community Council, who has been a leading voice in the campaign for a slowdown.
On Yell people have been horrified to learn the scale of a substation the size of two football pitches being planned within less than half a mile of their homes with its perpetual hum, not to mention its potential impact on residents’ health.
On The Shetland Podcast, local woman Jennifer Christie complains that requests to move the substation to a safer and more tolerable location seem to be falling on deaf ears, saying the developers only care about minimising cost and convenience, while the same parent company is reaping millions – even when their turbines are not turning! £600 million in “restraint payments” this year alone…coming out of our electricity bills.
“It’s all money, money, money…and what the community wants doesn’t seem to come into it,” Archer says.
Folk feel the consultation has been an exercise of fobbing them off, divide and conquer and even blackmail, leaving everyone with far too many unanswered questions.
With both the Scottish Government and Shetland Islands Council claiming they are powerless to slow things down, it has come down to community councils throughout Scotland to make a stand against the transformation of their homes into industrial landscapes.
These grass roots bodies have been setting up conventions throughout rural Scotland where an apparently endless number of applications to erect wind turbines and their associated infrastructure are flooding into planning departments for consent. Their aim is to persuade the government to set up a national Planning Inquiry Commission to examine the impact on communities and bring some order to this chaos.
To succeed they need local MSPs to stand with them…and Shetland’s community councils are hoping that Hannah Mary Goodlad will join Alistair Carmichael at next month’s meeting, which he has already pledged to attend.
Other countries, notably Denmark, appear to have been more successful in making demands on the renewables industry, where every wind farm is obligated to give their community a minimum 20 per cent stake. In Scotland developers are not even required to provide the £5,000 per megawatt per year the government has asked them to…it’s entirely voluntary!
More than 10 years ago, in 2015 the SNP government passed its “landmark” Community Empowerment Act. If ever there was a time when we needed real community empowerment, it is surely now.
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