Chamber and committees

Kathrin Haltiner submission of 14 June 2021

PE1864/KKK - Increase the ability of communities to influence planning decisions for onshore windfarms

I agree with the petition because it addresses a problem that we suffer from here in Caithness. Caithness has a large number of large windfarms and the number has increased rapidly over the last few years. Development is driven by money and greed and hardly any consideration is given to residents and local conditions. Time and again the recommendations by the Highland Council (which by the way is covering a huge area and doesn’t really count as local either) are overturned by the Scottish Government and industrial sized developments gradually destroy all our beautiful landscape and our peace and quiet.

The predominant attitude in the population is to just accept what we can’t change no matter how unhappy it makes us, simply because we don’t have a chance. If some people or a community group decide to fight they need to find a lot of time and money to fight their way through the complicated process and to pay for the help they need (if they can find reliable help). Unfortunately, there is a lot more money on the side of the developer, so even if the local group doesn’t give up and has some success, chances are that the developer will just resubmit a similar proposal later and will win eventually.

The only option left for someone up here who suffers from health issues triggered by windfarms is to sell their house and move away. Unfortunately, the price of their house which is very low already compared to average prices in the UK will have further dropped due to the proximity to those farms. The choice of alternative places to live is thus severely limited. The highland clearances from the 18th and 19th century come to mind where sheep were more important than people. Only now it is wind turbines that are more important than people.

The problem actually extends further than just to windfarms and encompassed the whole ‘wind industry’. We now see proposals for large energy storage systems to store the excess electricity produced by windfarms: industrial sized plants with compressors and turbines working 24/7 and producing a lot of noise. A recent proposal was for such a plant in the middle of a little village here in Caithness in the very north of Scotland. In an online public hearing where questions could be submitted by writing we were told that this plant was needed to prevent blackouts in London. Such a plant could just as well be built in an industrial area around London. But it is a lot cheaper and easier for them to build it thousands of miles away in a quiet little village where people’s objections aren’t heard.

I realise of course that we need to find a way to produce electricity in a sustainable way. However, having lived close to windfarms now for a while I start to have some doubt about the truth of the sustainability of the windfarms here. Forests are felled to clear sites, large areas of peat are disturbed to build foundations and access tracks and substations, enormous amounts of gravel and cement is used to anchor the massive turbines in the wobbly peat. We can see lorry after lorry going into the building sites and all these lorry loads just disappear into one hole to build a foundation for one turbine. The turbines are produced on the other side of the planet and shipped here at great cost. And that is only until they start to operate.

Still, at least some of these issues could be addressed if the whole development wasn’t left to private developers and private greed. A first step is addressed in this petition. If local communities get a voice and have a chance to be heard then at least the people who make the decision will hear about local conditions and can hopefully make better decisions about where the turbines can go and where they shouldn’t be. Local residents know where endangered species live and breed, they know where the fish spawn, they know where the rivers flood and how the seasons impact the land, they know which access routes are difficult. They also know which areas already suffer from the existing farms and shouldn’t be burdened further and they know which pockets of wild land are still undisturbed and should be protected. And finally, they have a lot of experience now with windfarms being built and operated in their area so they can help prevent making the same mistakes over and over again.

Even if local wishes can’t always be followed, it would at least be decent to allow for local concerns to be heard.