‘Up against a juggernaut that is moving full speed ahead’
In the latest edition of Sheeks Aboot Shetland hosts Pete Bevington and Jane Moncrieff discuss the implications of the outcome of Saturday’s energy convention which was organised by the Shetland Association of Community Councils (ASCC)
If you’re building a house, you make a plan before you lay the foundations, writes Pete Bevington.
You would do the same if you were building a housing scheme or a road network. So what about when you’re building a nation’s future energy system?
What became clear at Saturday’s historic meeting of Shetland’s community councils at Islesburgh Community Centre was that there is no overall plan for Scotland’s renewables. Instead there are targets and there is a massive race on to meet them.
Wind farm applications are pouring in to local authorities throughout rural Scotland. They are being sent in piecemeal by developers hungry to take advantage of the bonanza that these government targets have created: 20 gigawatts of onshore and 40 gigawatts of offshore wind generation within the next four years.
The planning laws in this country are stacked in favour of development, and communities are being overwhelmed. Local authorities are struggling to deal with huge applications while at the same time trying (one hopes) to represent the interests of local people who are becoming increasingly angry with the way they are being ignored. The losers in this game are residents whose homelands are being transformed before their very eyes while they look on helplessly.
This is what is called “corporate capture” and “democratic deficit”.
For many of us, addressing this deficit seemed to be one of our new MSP Hannah Mary Goodlad’s key election campaign pledges, which made it all the more perplexing to witness her refusing to support local community councils unanimously backing a nationwide call for a pause to all wind energy developments until a proper strategy has been put in place that takes local residents into account.
The price of Hannah Mary’s electoral success and her rapid promotion to government minister is that she has to tow the government line, as Tavish Scott discovered when he fell out with local fishermen while serving as transport minister in the early 2000s. And the government line is meeting its ambitious Net Zero targets by 2030.
Our MSP does have real ambition when it comes to gaining more local control of renewable developments. Her proposed Shetland Energy Act would be the equivalent of the ZCC Act that gave Shetland its oil wealth in the 1970s. But the Shetland Energy Act appears to be exclusively for Shetland, and this is a national issue.
The industry has found a way of overcoming objections to their plans and maximising their benefit. They break up their companies into subsidiaries that handle different aspects of their projects, they don’t explain the big picture they have in mind until it’s too late to stop it. As a result people feel misled, that they are being lied to, that they are powerless.
Thus it has come down to the “lowest rung of the democracy ladder”, community councils, to make a stand – local people who give up their limited time voluntarily to take on these giant behemoths and a planning system that has been stacked against them.
Photo: Shetland News
The unfairness of this system was dramatically highlighted by Andrew Archer of Tingwall, Whiteness and Weisdale community council. It would have cost SSE just £5 million to bury the cables now parading across the local landscape on big wooden pylons, just 10 days of wind production. They refused…but they did accept more than ten times that amount from the taxpayer to compensate them for electricity they were not able to generate and transmit because the national grid did not have the capacity to take it. How ridiculously unfair is that.
Meanwhile it has become literally impossible for small scale renewable developments to proceed, such as the ones created in Fair Isle or North Yell. They have simply been squeezed out of the system by the big boys.
Our MP Alistair Carmichael also refused to sign the call for a moratorium, but he said that was because it did not take account of Shetland and Orkney’s interests – fishing, for example – and offered to go away and rewrite it over the weekend, turning it into a document that did reflect island life.
But communities are up against a juggernaut that is moving full speed ahead and we are living inside a political system controlled by huge financial interests.
So where does this leave us. The chances of a moratorium are, at best, slim. We hear SSE(N) are keen to speak to the Yell folk after they objected to the siting of a substation, which suggests some recognition of community concerns. We shall see where that goes, but it’s hard to be optimistic.
Changing the system is a slow process, but it has to start somewhere. Saturday’s meeting felt like it was the start of something, a gathering of voices with a common theme. It is only by coming together at the grass roots and finding a common voice that we can hope for change, because it certainly won’t come from the top.
All the episodes of The Shetland Podcast can be found here.
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