I think Trump may have a point about Scotland's 'windmills'

The Herald Scotland

31-07-2025

It is increasingly urgent to separate these two categories of opinion. The Trumpites are unappeasable. The other is reasonable, mainly supportive of energy transition and deserves serious attention before that sound principle is further discredited by what increasingly resembles a Gold Rush mentality that 'anything goes'.
A sensible way to develop energy infrastructure would start by determining where power should be generated in order to meet demand. It would then ensure that the means of connection exist to carry that power to its markets, driven mainly by optimum economic efficiency (i.e. cost to consumers).
This strategy might well (as happened decades ago with the Hydro Electric schemes) be tempered by a social element; embracing the principle that no part of the country should be excluded from the right to generate power and obtain benefit from it. In the case of wind power, that would underpin the right of Scotland's periphery to contribute to the UK's energy needs and receive commensurate benefit.
If all this was set out clearly, there would be a reasonable prospect of public consent and political justification for facing down opposition. Again, it is useful to revert to the Hydro days, where the entrenched hostility of landowners had to be over-ruled in order for the schemes to proceed in the intersts of a greater social good.
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Having set out 'the sensible way' to approach these objectives, I should quickly acknowledge that they are now impossible to achieve. The noble concept of state planning to determine key elements of national infrastructure has been replaced with an incoherent mish-mash of privatisation, regulators and corporate greed. Instead of a plan, we have a jigsaw with many pieces missing and no picture to guide us.
Even then, the lack of cohesion around what has evolved is stunning and the costs incalculable. We have vast offshore projects which may never be built. Hugely expensive infrastructure which may never be fully utilised. Communities bewildered by the sheer scale of what they are confronted with. Serious questions unanswered about the underpinning rationale. And it is all being made up as they go along, driven by 'targets' which are almost certainly unattainable.
In Scotland, the main driving force was the Scottish Government's botched allocation of licences under the ScotWind programme, though there are also scores of onshore projects at various stages of the consenting process. In a more ideal world, I would call for a six month halt to each and every one of them until the demand for a big picture on which to base the resultant jigsaw is met. There are so many carts before horses.
How much power is needed? Where should it be generated from? What certainty can be attached to projects which would meet these objectives? Where is the hardware going to come from? What benefits are communities entitled to? None of these questions is being answered to any satisfactory degree. The calendar cannot be turned back to the point, at least five years ago, when clarity was essential. But the alternative, surely, is not just to keep digging and building.
Each of the ScotWind projects depends on successfully bidding (against each other) for subsidy under Contract for Difference and some of them, even then, will be on the fringes of offering an acceptable return to multinational developers and (foreign) state energy companies. But which will happen and which won't? By the time we know, how many pylons will have been built to meet a hypothetical demand?
The argument over zonal pricing highlights the fragility of all this. In terms of lower bills, it was a mirage and even the mirage would not have kicked in for at least seven years if the projects happened at all. The big Scottish energy companies led the campaign against zonal pricing but how many more demands will be made before their ScotWind projects actually happen? And at what ultimate cost?
To me, the most important aspect of the Government response which ruled out zonal pricing was the clear pointer towards generation being as close to markets as feasible which calls into question the lazy assumption that there is unlimited demand for Scottish wind power in the rest of the UK. Surely that question has to be addressed now, rather than letting 'the market decide' in five years time?
Then there is the whole question of community benefit which should have been addressed by the [[Scottish Government]] years ago, rather than being left to local communities to do their best against massive odds. The former leader of Highland Council, Michael Foxley, wrote last week that in 1991, they set a community benefit rate at £5k per MW which, adjusted for inflation, should now be £12.5k.
Instead, wrote Foxley, 'the average benefit paid in Highland is just £3k per MW'. Communities are being left 'with a few shiny beads' and things are going backwards in the prolonged absence of Government action to make standardised community benefit a condition of project approvals.
As usual in Gold Rushes, the landowners are coining it. There is an interesting case in the Court of Session at present in which the owner of 55,000 acres in the Cabrach area of Moray is suing EDF for what he claims is a shortfall to what they pay him to lease moorland on which 59 turbines are built.
Most unusually, this case has laid bare of the finances which underpin these deals. The landowner, a dodgy character named Christopher Moran, is claiming he is due another £6 million on top of the £28 million he has received over just three years. Transparency is another reasonable demand to which every community is entitled yet it is totally absent from the Gold Rush.
I have long advocated an energy transition linked to a balanced energy policy – we need a bit of everything to achieve a mix that is affordable, sustainable and secure. By placing so much reliance on wind, Scotland risks an outcome that meets none of these criteria. And absolutely nobody seems to be answerable or in charge.
Brian Wilson is a former Energy Minister. He was Labour MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003