By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby/Robin Guenier
This one got through the BBC censors!
The Great Energy Transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy has numerous dimensions: jobs lost and others created, electric vehicles, biofuelled planes, scrapped gas boilers and triple glazing.
But to those who live in rural communities near the picturesque village of Beauly, it means pylons and cables in four directions, a vast new substation, and the "Beauly buzz" that keeps some awake at night.
They are at the crossroads of a vast network of infrastructure being planned to bring power from where it will be generated within a decade, and to funnel it through the central Highlands towards the homes, businesses, hospitals and schools to the south where most of the demand is.
With a budget of £10bn, SSE Networks Transmission (SSEN) has a large share of more than £50bn that rewiring Britain is expected to cost. It is spending around two-thirds of its budget on sub-sea links, but it is the onshore links that are whipping up squalls of opposition.
Battles to protect scenic and environmentally sensitive areas from the march of ever-bigger wind turbines are now moving to pylons and cables.
And where these skirmishes used to be isolated to one or at most two communities affected by a wind farm, the campaigns are now strung along routes, like beacons.
Going south from Beauly, a high-voltage line has been part of the national electricity grid since 2015.
The Beauly-Denny line became famous and infamous as the battle over pylons of up to 60 metres (197ft) through the central Highlands, at their most obvious to road and rail travellers at the Drumochter Pass north of Pitlochry, and connecting to the southern network at Denny near Falkirk.
That took 14 years in planning and disputes, including five years for a public inquiry. Approval was given with numerous mitigating requirements to compromise with communities who did not want to see pylons and nature campaigners who worried about habitat.
That route is 130 miles long. The scale of what is now being planned is roughly three times as big. And following public meetings along the routes through spring and summer, campaigners believe they can tie this in knots if they secure public inquiries.
Some want the planned routes re-directed, away from homes, or at least away from their homes, or the cables undergrounded or laid under the sea.
Others are not interested in mitigations, but want the industrialisation of the Highlands to stop, saying the developer has not proven a need for so much intrusion into the landscape.
In an uncompromising campaign from the Kiltarlity and Kilmorie communities near Beauly, its leaders say they are getting regular contacts from others along these routes, now including those in the Mearns area south of Aberdeen.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-66336599
The whole concept of building huge amounts of wind power capacity in the remoteness of Scotland was always highly flawed. It was clearly never going to be economically viable when all of these infrastructure costs were added in.
Yet the policy was driven forward by both UK and Scottish governments, the latter in the inane belief that it would make Scotland energy independent.
Quite apart from the environmental devastation, there is also that cost of more than £50 billion to pay for rewiring Britain. We will all be paying the bill for this in years to come.
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July 31, 2023 at 03:51AM
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