December 13, 2012
Letters, Scotland

Bleak vision of a landscape straddled by dead turbines

Edinburgh Evening News | 13 December 2012 | www.scotsman.com

Supporters of nuclear electricity generation are rightly met with arguments which insist on including the price of decommissioning dead power stations.

It is only logical to apply the same argument to on-shore wind turbines. Land owners who opt for wind turbines, and the companies which operate them, should have a significant percentage of their subsidies held back to cover their subsequent removal and disposal – it won’t be long before Scottish Government thinking catches up with its people, to realise that the turbines generate nothing efficiently except subsidies.

Unless the money is taken from the subsidy junkies up front, it will have magically disappeared when the time comes, and turbine owners will be asking for even more public money to remove the damned things… or Scotland will be left with thousands of giant, dead turbines straddling our landscape like the rotting Martian fighting machines in the last scene of The War of the Worlds.

There is a Greenish future for Scotland’s power needs, but it lies in our lochs and the waters around our coast; when will Parliament wake up to what its voters have known for years? Why does Holyrood always have to play “catch-up”?

David Fiddimore, Calton Road, Edinburgh

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/12/13/bleak-vision-of-a-landscape-straddled-by-dead-turbines/