| Wind Watch is a registered educational charity, founded in 2005. |
Europe's biggest wind farm will bring few benefits to the people of Scotland
Translate: FROM English | TO English
Translate: FROM English | TO English
Construction is under way at Whitelee, near Eaglesham, on Europe’s largest wind farm, with the first Siemens-manufactured turbines now in place. When it is completed in 2009, this wind farm will have an installed capacity of 322MW, will apparently produce enough electricity to supply 200,000 homes and will cost ScottishPower £300 million.
Is this good news for Scotland? Well, it has been labelled by some wind enthusiasts as the “Saudi Arabia of wind”. Certainly, we have much more than our fair share of wind, and Saudi has the world’s greatest reserves of oil. Indeed, this year Saudi Arabia will earn about £75 billion from sales of oil.
So how much will Scotland “earn” from this giant wind farm? With the high-value turbines having been manufactured abroad, I reckon more than 75 per cent of the total value of the project will be spent outside Scotland. How many permanent jobs will it produce? No more than a handful. Not a lot there for Scotland from the exploitation of its wind resource, though the local landowner will do quite well.
How will foreign-owned ScottishPower fare? The electricity produced by this wind farm will earn it one renewable obligation certificate (ROC), for each MWhr. These can be traded at about £40 each. This is the rather opaque subsidy mechanism introduced by the Westminster government to encourage investment in new renewables. Most people have never heard of ROCs, but they are paying for them in their electricity bills.
The Whitelee wind farm should net ScottishPower about £40 million a year in subsidy, which, of course, will be in addition to what it gets from selling electricity. As this subsidy regime is to run for the next 20 years, I think ScottishPower will do quite well out of the Whitelee wind farm.
Yes, Scotland may well be the Saudi of wind, but at least the Saudi government makes sure the Saudi people benefit from the exploitation of their oil much more than the oil companies.
NICK DEKKER, Nairn Way, Cumbernauld
13 december 2007
This article is the work of the source indicated. Any opinions expressed in it are not necessarily those of National Wind Watch.
The copyright of this article resides with the author or publisher indicated. As part of its noncommercial educational effort to present the environmental, social, scientific, and economic issues of large-scale wind power development to a global audience seeking such information, National Wind Watch endeavors to observe “fair use” as provided for in section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law and similar “fair dealing” provisions of the copyright laws of other nations. Send requests to excerpt, general inquiries, and comments via e-mail.
| Wind Watch relies entirely on User Contributions |
 (via Stripe) |
 (via Paypal) |
Share:
[ Short URL: https://wind-watch.org/news/?p=9275 ]
