For some days now locals on Shetland Mainland have noticed that none of the 103 turbines forming the Viking Energy developments have been turning. Most of them seem to have been frozen in one position, and potentially at risk of damage if hit by strong winds from the “wrong” direction. The local press has been contacted by several people about it. Having investigated what’s been going on, the Shetland News now has an article explaining what’s behind yet another period of inactivity on the part of the wind farm.

Thankfully for hard-pressed energy users and taxpayers, the latest downtime hasn’t been the result of SSE (Viking’s owners) milking the system for constraints payments. By way of brief digression, Shetland News also reported earlier this month that SSE received £9.25M in constraints payments for the Viking Energy wind farm, despite opening only in August 2024. They received £2.7M in October alone, finishing in third place for the year, despite only being operational (if so many closures can be described as being operational), behind only Seagreen and Moray East, both offshore wind farms.

However, it has been noted that the constraint payments have been drastically reduced in December and January. It may be that SSE have been told to reduce their constraints claims because of resulting adverse publicity.

In any event, we now have the official explanation for the recent failure of the massively controversial and environmentally unfriendly wind farm. The line is that it “was due to a planned maintenance outage of the 600MW HVDC cable to the Scottish mainland.” I am in no position to gainsay that, but if true, it seems to be remarkably inefficient, given that it started generating power only in August 2024. As Frank Hay, Chairman of Sustainable Shetland, is quoted as saying:

There seems to be a very high number of planned outages for a wind farm that has been operating for less than six months.

He wonders whether Viking Energy is experiencing more problems than SSE Renewables is prepared to admit, and so do I. The latest problems include the fact that 16 out of the 103 turbines on site require aviation lighting but only seven of these lighting units have been operating as they should. The breach of statutory requirements has been reported to the Civil Aviation Authority, so it will be interesting to see what happens next. Article 222 of the Civil Aviation Order 2016 requires any building, structure or erection, the height of which is 150 metres or more above ground level to be fitted with medium intensity steady red lights positioned as close as possible to the top of the obstacle and at intermediate levels spaced so far as practicable equally between the top lights and ground level with an interval of not more than 52 metres.

How can we expect the UK’s lights to be kept on by wind energy when it can’t even comply with its legal obligations to keep safety lights on atop their own turbines? To add one final irony to the whole sorry saga, the wind farm is dependent on back-up energy (translation, possibly batteries, but more likely diesel generators). SSE say they are working with their turbine contractor, Vestas, to “review our back up” power generation options on site should any future extended outages occur.

It’s all really not a good look.