Viking Raiders Meeting Stiff Opposition

As you may or may not have known, all last week I was on holiday in the Shetland Islands, taking the overnight ferry and spending a few days touring a part of Scotland I hadn't seen before. Actually, there's lots of Scotland I haven't seen before, but for some reason the Shetlands were calling out to me.

Before I go any further, I just want to share a couple of photos I took - for no other reason than to make Crafty Green Poet and Andrew Ellis jealous!

Great Skua

Gannet

Puffin

The first two photos were taken while on a boat trip on the second day. On the first day I had travelled to Sumburgh Head on the southern tip of the mainland by bus, and had noted that for an island, there was very little in the way of renewable energy going on. In fact, I only saw one small wind turbine powering a community centre, and absolutely no solar installations (either thermal or PV).

Then when we were out on the boat bobbing around in the North Sea, being dive-bombed by Skuas, I looked back at the mainland and saw the familiar whirring of a couple of large turbines. I passed close to them the next day, and there are five altogether.

I can testify to the Shetlands being a windy place. There aren't any trees on the island, so there are no natural windbreaks. A perfect place for a large windfarm, yes?

That's exactly what a company called Viking Energy are proposing - 150 turbines on the mainland producing 540MW of electricity. They claim that is enough to supply 20% of Scotland's domestic power needs and will contribute a whopping 12% to the government's 2020 renewable energy target. Plus money being pumped into a local economy which seems rather too reliant on a dwindling North Sea Oil industry.

Unfortunately there are major problems with the Viking Energy proposal, which has made it easy for the usual NIMBY arguments to rear their head. The major drawback is that the island itself is covered in peat. Peat is not a firm foundation for wind turbines, so it would have to be cut. And cutting peat releases an enormous amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. It's one of the reasons that saw the giant Lewis Wind Farm scrapped.

For an environmentalist, the letters page and opinion columns in the Shetland Times are painful to read. They are loaded with the usual lies, half-truths and speculation about turbines causing headaches, exploding bats and conspiracies about efficiency.

I suspect that there will be a wind farm on Shetland eventually - it's too good a location for there not to be - but that it will be nowhere near the size it needs to be. The irony is that Shetland may become the ultimate Transition place when the oil runs out - but will be wholly unprepared for it.