Alison Mitchell of the Ramblers Association and William Oxenham (Letters, 3 September) are right to protest about wind farms and the subsidies which make them viable.
We are being forced to pay for the pointless destruction of our own wonderful scenery and wildlife habitat. In Dumfries and Galloway we face an appalling threat from numerous applications for wind farms which would ravage our gentle and beautiful landscape, and the dangers for the rest of Scotland are similar and as acute.
Here is an opportunity for our new Scottish administration to act on behalf of Scotland; to refuse to kowtow to Westminster, which levied the subsidies, and the multinationals, which profit from them; to earn the gratitude of Scots everywhere by halting once and for all the development of all on-shore wind farms and the hideous mega-pylons they spawn.
WILLIAM CRAWFORD
Dalgonar
Dunscore, Dumfriesshire
You report that greenhouse gas emissions have fallen in Scotland (5 September). While I welcome this, it has nothing to do with wind farms, as electricity from that source doesn’t displace fossil generation. The reason it doesn’t is that a power station cannot be fine-tuned to suit the variations and intermittence of the wind and this back-up is constantly needed to sustain a reliable electricity supply.
While the wind is renewable, clean and free, wind-produced electricity fed into the grid is none of these because of the back-up required from conventional power station sources. Wind farms, therefore, should not be considered a renewable, and are profitable and being built only because of the consumer-funded subsidy.
To make matters worse, they have a permanent destructive effect on the landscape and serious effects on the environment, wildlife and birds.
A R NELSON
Scarletmuir
Lanark
7 September 2007
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2007/09/08/subsidising-the-destruction-of-our-countryside/