Wind farm would bring misery to Aultmore residents 

Professor Dean pointed out (Letters, ‘The Scot’, October 12) that an unrelenting, low-intensity hum emanates from wind turbines, and he contrasted this with the silence of the wind turbine companies on the matter.

He observed that, driven out by perpetual noise, the local fauna will eventually be forced to move away, thus leaving a ‘dead’ area – but the local human residents in Moray have no such option.

It is almost impossible to gauge the misery of the Aultmore residents if Moray Council sentences them to be imprisoned in their unsaleable properties and subjected to the torture of unstoppable noise night and day for the 25-year life of the wind turbines. Is that human cost to be the price of the UK’s carbon footprint? Wind turbines are not ‘green’.

An early attempt to erect a wind farm resulted in the collapse of the hill on which it was being built, due to the sheer weight of concrete being pumped into it.

And, in a county where quarrying is controlled for ecological reasons, the Aultmore wind farm plans attempt to get round those very regulations by masking quarrying activities in terms of ‘borrow-pits’.

The ‘green initiative’ of imposing wind turbines on people living at the extremities of Europe is promulgated by European bureaucrats who care as little for Scottish residents as they do for Scottish fishermen.

Experience has demonstrated that the plum jobs and the big money to be had from the wind farm industry are distributed outwith Scotland.

One of the menial jobs left for our own boys will be to scrape the bird-kill and insect-kill off the blades to enable them to work more ‘efficiently’.

Wind power is paraded as The Answer To Nuclear, but wind turbine output is staggeringly, jaw-droppingly inefficient. Even if every available centimetre of Moray’s wild places were to be turned over to wind turbines, their combined output on a windy day would be insufficient even to power the UK’s toasters.

The proposed wind turbines at Aultmore will not be the dinky sort seen adjacent to the A96 past Huntly. Each one will be over 350 feet high, and this in an area where planning permission for anything over one-and-a-half storeys is hard to come by.

Why doesn’t the non-Scottish firm that wants to put up these turbines erect them at the point of need? The answer was given in a recent BBC poll which identified the wind turbine as the Number 1 Eyesore. The focus is therefore on erecting the eyesores at the extremities of the UK.

The local Tourist Strategy is working flat-out to attract visitors to Moray to enjoy the wild places, walking trails and whisky. These strategic efforts will come to naught when the proliferation of wind turbines and pylons desecrates the Moray skyline.

Finally, it will be necessary to double the height of the existing pylons to wick away such miserable power as will be generated by the wind turbines.

Those same pylons will, however, facilitate the transfer of electricity generated by the real Answer To Nuclear, the tidal power initiative, to mainland entry points along the Moray coast.

By the time that happens, of course, it will be too late for the residents of Moray to stop the juggernaut.

The Scottish wildcats that are such a feature of Aultmore can (and will) move on, but human beings that share their environment will have no such option. Any vote for the monstrous Aultmore wind turbines is a vote that will consign the Aultmore residents to a hellish existence. – Yours etc,

Sarah Henderson, (By e-mail)

The Northern Scot

2 November 2007