Wind farm row blows up
A huge row over the biggest land-based wind farm ever proposed in Britain is coming to a climax.
A decision on whether to proceed with the 181-windmill development on the Hebridean island of Lewis is imminent. Some reports claim that Scottish ministers have already turned down the project on environmental grounds.
The decision has implications for the growth of renewable energy in Britain. The message to developers is likely to be that they must create projects in the right place. Blaming NIMBY attitudes will not be enough to ignore other environmental issues.
The EU plans for a massive renewables expansion. Britain will have to achieve renewable electricity generation eight times what it is today, within 12 years. Wind is likely to provide most of this.
Picturesque in the summer, the moors of north Lewis are desolate in midwinter, a treeless expanse of grass and peat. But they do get strong Arctic winds from the north Atlantic.
It emerged that the Scottish executive was “minded to refuse” the £500m scheme as it would seriously damage the moor’s extremely fragile, internationally-protected habitats for rare birds such as dunlin, golden eagles, merlin, golden plover and red-throated divers. The moor itself is one of the most ecologically-significant peat bogs in Europe.
Scottish ministers have since come under intense pressure to reverse that provisional decision before making a final announcement this month.
But for MSP Alasdair Allan, this scheme was simply too big, too brutal for Lewis. With a population of 12,000, and a culture of self-reliance, this is an invasion. The island’s economy “can’t progress on the basis of one enormous industrial wind farm”, he said “particularly if it doesn’t enjoy community support.”
Loading ...
February 5th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
The New Planning Bill
These new planning proposals are being rushed through Parliament and currently make no provision for accountability to local communities for major planning decisions. This legislation, if it goes through without proper discussion and appraisal, is a charter for global corporate companies to prioritise their commercial needs in local government planning.
“The Bill introduces a new system for approving major infrastructure of national importance, such as harbours and waste facilities, and replaces current regimes under several pieces of legislation. The objective is to streamline these decisions and avoid long public inquiries.” http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2007-08/planning.html
It seems to us that economic sustainability is now more important than economic growth. If this law were to be used to push through wind-farms and tidal power barriers across the Severn, local protests might be over-ridden.
Sustainability depends on communities responses to opportunities and threats, and if you remove communities’ ability to respond through democratic channels, the danger is that the local community will move against the project in subversive ways. This could allow the ‘us & them’ situation between city and rural communities to widen destructively.
After all, city people depend on farming for their life!