Pylon scheme concerns raised at Dunbeath: 'It is time for communities to say enough'
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No part of the Highlands will be safe from industrialisation if plans for massive new power lines and substations are allowed to go ahead, people living in south-east Caithness have been told.
A public meeting in Dunbeath heard that communities will be "bombarded with more and more wind farm applications and lots more infrastructure" unless the controversial proposals by SSEN Transmission are halted.
Those backing the project say it is necessary to meet government targets on renewable energy – but campaigners argue that the project is about money rather than the environment, and insist the transmission lines and the turbines they will serve are not needed.
Tuesday night's meeting in Dunbeath community hall was organised by Dunbeath/Berriedale Community Say NO to Pylons, under the umbrella of Berriedale and Dunbeath Community Council, and attracted an audience of well over 100.
It was called in response to the plans by SSEN Transmission for a 400kV line between Spittal in Caithness, Loch Buidhe in Sutherland and Beauly in Inverness-shire which will include new substations at each location.
Two representatives of Highland-based campaign group Communities B4 Power Companies (CB4PC), Lyndsey Ward and Denise Davis, outlined the key arguments against the scheme and emphasised that their aim is to secure a public inquiry.
"Our lives could change forever – and our elected representatives must support us, not a private Big Energy company," Mrs Ward said, while Mrs Davis likened the push for more renewables to "replacing one big dirty industry, fossil fuels, with another big dirty industry".
The project is part of SSEN Transmission’s £7 billion Pathway to 2030 upgrade of UK energy infrastructure in the north of Scotland. Another high-voltage line is planned from Peterhead to Beauly, linking with the existing Beauly to Denny power line.
Supporters say it will help economic growth in the region and claim investment in the electricity network will be essential for local supply chains as well as making progress towards net-zero.
This week's meeting was chaired by Angus MacInnes, chairman of Berriedale and Dunbeath Community Council. He explained that SSEN Transmission will be invited to a further meeting in the coming weeks to face questions and listen to local opinions.
Mrs Ward told the audience: "I, like most of you, only became aware of what we are threatened with earlier in the year when I went to a local public consultation held by SSEN.
"Consultation used here in the loosest sense of the word. Of course some never got notified and have only managed to find out what was going on by locals spreading the word, social media and the press.
"I think most of us realised that we were being presented with something akin to a fait accompli.
"Many felt SSEN’s plans had already been a long time in the process and yet here we were, only being told now that our opinions mattered.
"We certainly were not helped by SSEN to understand what was going on and their replies to questions were slow to come if they came at all. I know others, like me, were not impressed with their actions. We are still far from impressed.
"Our group is committed to stopping SSEN in full because if we do not object to this gigantic proposal in full we will be bombarded with more and more wind farm applications and lots more infrastructure. It is starting already.
"We have no option. Nowhere in the Highlands will be safe from industrialisation. We will become an industrial hub for England.
"SSEN has already refused to confirm if these are the last lot of lines to come our way.
"Scotland has no legal requirement to permit the infrastructure to provide England with electricity. The UK government cannot force Scotland to approve it. The Scottish Government has 100 per cent planning powers devolved to them and not one turbine or pylon can be constructed here without their say-so."
Pointing out that the Scottish Government does not own wind farms, Mrs Ward said: "SSE and SSEN are private companies with shareholders to keep happy. SSE owns 75 per cent of SSEN. The other 25 per cent is the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan.
"This is about money. It is not for the good of the planet or you and I – it is about their bottom line, pure and simple."
She went on: "England’s infrastructure will not be able to take any more wind energy from us for many years. More wind farms will mean an even bigger bottleneck and more millions paid out by us for constraints to switch the turbines off.
"The current cost to us is nearly £1.5 billion, all put on our energy bills. That doesn’t include something called forward energy trades – it's a sort of secret constraint.
"Despite efforts from many over several years we have been unable to get a figure from Westminster. We do know that in 2011 it was running parallel with the constraint figure in the public domain. We can only hope it's still not running parallel with an extra £1.5b on our bills.
"Where else could all this new wind power go if not to England? Into storage batteries?
"No industrialised nation can run off batteries, certainly not for days when the wind doesn’t blow, as is common in the summer and in freezing winters. The production of large-scale batteries has its own serious environmental and economic issues and we are far from that being a reality for taking the power of thousands more turbines. The same goes for pumped storage.
"There are so many conflicting reports as to whether green hydrogen is truly viable, clean or affordable on a large scale. Recent reports have shown that even environmental groups are not backing it because of its dubious credentials. It also takes a lot of energy, so will the production plants only work when the wind blows or will they have to draw from the grid?"
Mrs Ward explained that CB4PC is taking advice from a planning policy expert with decades of experience and is demanding "evidence of need".
She said: "This is a massive and profound landscape change of national scale throughout the whole of the north Highlands. The piecemeal planning application approach to this infrastructure is both unfair and unsatisfactory.
"We want a consolidated approach, not confusing bits and pieces, and a maximum of one planning application per line.
"We are also asking for the overarching plan for the Highlands, for Scotland and the wider UK to be made public to be able to assess more accurately what is being planned and if it is indeed necessary.
"So far we have had no response other than corporate waffle and links from SSEN.
"This infrastructure proposed by SSEN is not for transmitting electricity throughout Scotland. It is for transmitting electricity south to England and perhaps further afield. England has no hope of taking it now or for at least a decade, even if they want it.
"Current constraints to stop wind energy being generated into the grid in Scotland, and which we the consumers pay wind farm owners to do, are done because the energy cannot be transmitted south of the border. In a nutshell, Scotland has too many wind farms already for its own good."
Mrs Ward told the meeting about her experience of opposing the Beauly to Denny power line, which went live in 2015.
"I am sure some of you have seen the Beauly/Denny and the 42-acre sprawling industrial mess that is Balblair substation," she said.
"That was once a small, pretty inoffensive switching station built for the hydro dams some decades before. It is so huge now it can only be seen in its entirety from the air. It has had, until recently, a noise abatement notice slapped on it.
"So noisy was this development that residents reported glasses of water rippling on their bedside cabinets, B&B guests asked for their money back and one couple had to take their touring caravan to a quiet location just to get some sleep. One resident speaks of the vibrations felt through his pillow at night.
"Fishermen on the famous River Beauly also reported the noise from transmission lines as annoying and distracting.
"This gives us a snapshot of the future. The Beauly/Denny-sized pylons are huge, averaging 57m, and the new substations SSEN proposes will be bigger than the Balblair substation.
"There is a 500-acre substation complex near Peterhead. That's bigger than the community it will be next to, a despairing community councillor told us."
She added: "The more people who wake up to what is really going on, the more objections they will face.
"If you are a landowner who wants to stand up to SSEN, join our list via our Facebook page – just message Denise.
"Beauly/Denny was fought and lost on environmental issues – nearly 20,000 objectors. The battle to protect the landscape and wildlife was lost.
"I was living here when it was constructed and it was terrible – it was a dreadful, disturbing and heartbreaking experience, machinery rattling and beeping with engines roaring and helicopters buzzing in and out of our once-peaceful glens.
"It went on for an incredibly long time, as did the abundance of construction traffic speeding on our narrow and previously quiet rural roads.
"It was simply horrendous. We are all now left with the visual pollution and some are still affected by the noise from all this industrial hardware today."
On the issue of constraints payments, Mrs Ward said: "With very lucrative constraints to not generate into the grid, operators get paid as if they were generating. It’s almost as though constraints are the new public subsidy and more turbines will, of course, make that worse for the consumer.
"Contracts for Difference [CFDs] are being awarded to the lowest wind bidder at, frankly, uneconomically low prices and contracts are quite legally being delayed so that the wind operators can take advantage of the gas prices that wind power is linked to.
"Interestingly, there were no bids for CFDs from offshore for this latest round, with the wind industry whining there wasn’t enough money in it for them and asking for yet more government support.
"So when you hear how cheap it all is, look at your energy bill and realise that propaganda is based on the price bid by the developer not what they are actually getting.
"Nobody’s energy bill will ever go down with industrial wind power, of that you can be certain. Nor will it ever give us energy security, as our recent importing of energy from England for days has proved.
"There are other examples of expensive loopholes that are being exploited, but suffice it to say the UK consumer is getting a very poor deal from supposedly cheap wind power.
"What is crystal clear is that we don’t need these transmission lines or the thousands more turbines they will serve.
"We haven’t even touched on the potential health impacts of living close to high-voltage power lines.
"Our aim is to get a public inquiry. SSEN's aim is not to have one. We want SSEN cross-examined in a public forum.
"It is time for communities to say enough. SSEN has refused to say if these are the last of the pylon lines to come. We want a halt called to all of this and a reset.
"We all want to look after the environment and those of us who care passionately about it have its best interests at heart. Profit-driven multinationals do not."
Answering a question from the audience about climate change, Mrs Ward said: “As far as I'm concerned there's no evidence that wind turbines will change what the climate does, because it's all very cherry-picked.
“For example the steel from China – they ramp up their coal production to produce it, because we can't do it in this country because the electricity is now too expensive. Chinese steel is produced by using coal, so the mining and burning has increased to satisfy world demand for turbines and pylons. It is then transported in diesel ships.
"None of this is factored in to the wind farms – it's not in their footprint. The way this all works is that the pollution is in the country of origin.
"It's such a farce. It's all to do with money.”
Mrs Davis told the meeting: "We want to fight this thing in its entirety.
"We do not believe in the industrialisation of the Highlands for the benefit of Big Energy, other countries' energy demands and their net-zero targets. These are basically figures on paper rather than a cleaner, less industrialised world.
"We have been challenging SSEN to demonstrate a need for this infrastructure, and so far they have been unable to prove this need. They continually pass the buck to the Scottish and UK governments and [energy regulator] Ofgem – yet these bodies pass the buck back to SSEN.
"We want to be shown the evidence of need – yet to this point, no-one has been able to prove it. What is the issue?
"Many years ago the Scottish Government had an open-door policy to wind farm developers with the plans for Scotland to be the ‘Saudi Arabia of renewables.’ You will remember [Alex] Salmond saying that.
"This resulted in haphazard planning policy and no route map for development. Cheap land and forestry, along with greedy landlords, enabled wind farms to be developed in areas where there was little resistance due to low populations and fewer votes, and very far from where the energy was needed.
"The infrastructure in place can cope with the energy we require in Scotland. But we have too many wind turbines, hence the curtailment – the shutting off of wind turbines and getting paid for it. We, the consumers, pay for that.
"The reason why SSEN wants to upgrade the grid is so they can send electricity beyond Scotland. SSEN wants this infrastructure so they can connect up more wind farms to produce more energy to meet net-zero requirements south of the border and abroad.
"After being cornered many times regarding this matter, the multinational finally admitted it."
She warned: "If we do not object to this gigantic proposal in full we will be bombarded by more and more wind farm applications. The consumer will be hit hard with further constraint payments, but also wind farm developers will continue to allow their turbines to spin when the energy isn’t needed, store it in battery storage units, and then they'll sell it back to the grid at a higher price.
"And more and more of this will happen because the interconnected grids between Scotland and England, and England and Ireland and Europe, cannot cope with the amount of energy that Scotland is producing even now. There is nowhere to transmit it in the huge quantities currently being produced, and certainly what will be produced should the infrastructure be permitted."
Mrs Davis pointed out that Scotland is renowned for its natural beauty and the diversity of its wildlife. "It is also known for its people," she said. "Many make their living out of this amazing landscape."
Industrialising it, she argued, "will change that forever". She said: "Nothing like this has been proposed for the Highlands in over 50 years, since the hydro schemes came along. But those were supposed to be to produce energy for local needs for Highlanders."
Mrs Davis then quoted figures from Ofgem predicting that Scotland’s peak electricity demand will double in the next 20 years, taking it to nine gigawatts (GW) in winter and seven in summer.
In terms of onshore wind alone, Scotland already has 19.95GW in the system, she said – more than double Ofgem’s predictions for what will be needed in 20 years' time.
Scottish Government figures, "plus reasonable assumptions on repowering and extensions", allow an overall onshore and offshore provision for 2030/32 to be 71.9GW, she noted.
"To be clear, those figures do not include any current or future contributions from solar or other technologies, that's just wind power," Mrs Davis said. "So nearly 72GW – that is eight times what Ofgem predicts Scotland will need in the winter in 2042."
Mrs Davis went on: "What must be fully understood in the context of all of this is that Scotland does not directly financially benefit from electricity production. Energy is private enterprise and the money made benefits the shareholders.
"Of course, taxes are paid and some communities receive benefit. But the Scottish Government does not own wind farms or the grid, and it does not have investment in them that brings financial gain to benefit the population.
"SSE, SSEN, and wind farm developers are private companies with shareholders – nothing more.
"We have been told relentlessly about the thousands of jobs, the influx of money, the lowering of energy costs and how this industrialisation will not be detrimental to our landscape, quality of life and our livelihoods.
"But has any of this become a reality? Does anyone look at the various substations and the mega pylons of the Beauly to Denny line marching down the A9 think, ‘Yes, this has improved things for me?’
"Energy companies propose a worst-case scenario to the public, pretend to consult, and then ‘compromise’, when all along they are giving you exactly what they had always planned to give you. They are engaging in a required box-ticking exercise."
The aim, she said, was to persuade Highland Council to object and to trigger a public inquiry.
"At public inquiry level, SSEN will be cross-examined and questioned about the need for the infrastructure," Mrs Davis said. "So far they have not delivered anything on it."
Responding to a question from the audience about the impact on birds and the marine environment of wind energy expansion, Mrs Davis said: “I would say this is replacing one big dirty industry, fossil fuels, with another big dirty industry. And sadly we don't see the impact of the dirty industry until after they've made all their money, and then it's time to invent a new dirty industry where they can make money.
"And when suddenly it's, 'Oh, my gosh – these things are killing animals, these things have caused health problems for people.'”
