Revolution E-Book

Todd Westbrook

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Having written for a decade and a half on the renewable energy revolution, seasoned journalist Todd Westbrook here provides a potted history of Scottish wind power in the past, the present and the future an its potential to revolutionise power production across the world. Revolution takes readers on a fascinating journey from the industry's origins in the 1950s to contemporary developments, at the same time providing insight from industry experts and dispelling some of the common myths and misconceptions associated with wind power. In this climate emergency, we must do anything we can to lessen our environmental impact. This is an accessible, inspirational guide to how Scotland can and must achieve change.

Leseprobe

TODD WESTBROOKis a career journalist, writer and editor lucky enough to have worked for newspapers, magazines, agencies and online outlets in a variety of countries and across a wide range of subject areas. More than a million words have been published under his byline across news, features, analysis and long-form pieces. His adopted home is in the Scottish Highlands.@tswstbrk tswestbrook.com

First published2020

ISBN: 978-1-910022-19-1

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act1988has been asserted.

Typeset by Carrie Hutchison.

© Todd Westbrook2020

Revolution

A short, sharp history of Scottish wind power– and where it goes in the future

TODD WESTBROOK

For J

For the obvious reasons

And the not so obvious reasons

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1. Testing a Theory

2.The Screamand the Strange Birth of Alternative Energy in Scotland

3. Pioneers

4. Entering the Mainstream

First Intermission

5. Money, Jobs, Land and Subsidies

6. The End of the Beginning

7. Antis, Nimbys and Other Opposition – Plus the Grid

8. Islands

9. Wind Walks on Water

Second Intermission

10. Daventry Pulls the Plug

11. Becalmed

12. The Turbine on the Hill

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Some Useful Websites

Foreword

CONSIDER THIS Ahealth warning: what you are about to read is not intended as a dry, dispassionate, unopinionated discourse on every facet of the Scottish wind industry between ground zero and the present day. If that were the case, this book would be calledThe Scottish Wind Industry 1950–2020. I will leave that title to the academics.

Granted, I spent more than 15 years of my life providing fact-based, news-driven coverage of the wind revolution in Scotland, and elsewhere around the globe, for a leading industry-focused publication. It was not a trade paper nor did it feature the evangelical campaigning favoured by many renewable energy publishers; the starting point for my journalism was not ‘wind is fantastic’ but simply ‘wind is…’ – good, bad and/or ugly could be appended by the reader, as dictated by the information involved.

Coverage was neutral and any comment was clearly labelled and confined to the leader column, but nevertheless written with the subscriber – essentially those involved in the renewable energy sector – in mind. The publication was never fawning but it was serving a readership paying for market intelligence, and even opinion had to contribute towards that end. Yes, my personal political views snuck into print every now and again (from Scottish independence to Brexit,UStrade policy to European bureaucracy), but even deeply held beliefs were framed and restrained by the needs of the paying public. No grandstand soapboxing from me.

A fierce devotion to telling the whole story simultaneously won friends and made enemies. Po-faced corporates were generally unimpressed with my efforts, however factual. Those with wider horizons and longer-term concerns understood that information is a necessary driver of learning and improvement, although perhaps that flatters me. In the end, I was really just trying to provide news that had not been reported elsewhere; if it was something that somebody, somewhere, did not want to see in print, as the saying goes, it probably had a better chance of making the front page.

What was not possible in the day-in-day-out grind of life as a beat reporter, later editor, was long-term perspective. That was not just a matter of time, of which there was never enough, it was more because providing context to a complex beast evolving over decades involves, by the very nature of the task, a prism of subjectivity. My old-fashioned journalistic creed considered any such intrusion an anathema; the more than a million words published under my byline never featured the first person pronoun outside of quotation marks.

This book is different. It is a personal, narrative history of a part of modern Scottish life that was centre stage for much of my professional career. The words that follow are about making sense of the milestones, roadblocks and wider achievements that make up one of the more remarkable social and economic events of the last 25 years. There was a time in the not so distant past when there were zero commercial wind turbines in Scotland; that there are now thousands deserves some consideration, particularly given the challenges looming in the shape of increasing energy demands and the ever-more acute climate crisis.

From the outset, it will be clear that I am no expert.I do, however, know who those experts are and where to find them, and it is largely they who tell the story you are about to read. But I am also there. Yes, everything that follows is, to the best of my ability, factual and faithfully represented.I have attributed sources when necessary and where possible without disrupting the flow of the narrative, but steered clear of footnotes. Nothing is imagined, assumed or extrapolated, but rather based on source materials or first-hand experiences. If there are any inaccuracies or misreadings they are not intentional but they are my responsibility, and I apologise in advance should that turn out to be the case.

This is, after all, a story of my telling; I have picked out what I believe is important, those moments that seem pivotal, those events that shaped what was to come. The people on the pages to come were not chosen at random; they have been allowed, even encouraged, to put forward their unadulterated and unchallenged beliefs, recollections and opinions. A different author, having selected a different series of guides, would likely follow a radically different trail of crumbs through the same forest of facts. I do, however, believe any chronicler would arrive at the same destination.

The timeline of this history starts with a revolutionary experiment on Orkney at the start of the 1950s. It concludes with profound questions about the sort of Scotland we want to live in, questions that would not have been asked 25 years ago. I suppose that must be considered progress of sorts.

Note: In a bid to address a few common myths and misconceptions about wind power, this book features a scavenger hunt of relatively unscientific and very personal responses to a dozen of the concerns most regularly raised about the sector in Scotland either during official discourse or when having a casual but suddenly interrupted drink at a nearby bar.

Introduction

MEGAWATTS, KILOWATT-HOURS, ASYNCHRONOUSgenerators and carbon paybacks will sometimes take centre stage in this short, sharp history of Scottish wind power but have no fear: the journey you will take over the following pages is not predominantly scientific, industrial or mechanical. It is human.

It is about saving the planet and living in the kind of world we always imagined; it is about a country moving away from smog, nuclear waste, leaky pipelines and slag heaps (bings, if you are local). It is about endlessly drawing power from the air around us and addressing global warming and being ‘green’ – whatever that actually means.

A certain amount of terminology is, however, necessary to explain the highways and byways of Scotland’s wind power story over the last 25 years and as with all journeys some patience will be required as we travel from A to B. The final destination will be worth the investment of time, energy and vocabulary; trust me.

It must nevertheless be acknowledged, particularly in this age of digital navigation aids, that many readers will require a sneak-peek at the bigger picture – an overview of the route ahead – to establish a feeling from the outset for that winding blue line of travel, a sense of where the pilot is going to take us and what roads are going to feature along the way, in order to judge for themselves the commitment necessary.

Wind as a source of power has been with mankind for many thousands of years, harnessed for transport through the medium of the sail or translated via rotating ‘arms’ to drive millstones and draw water. Ruins of effective early installations can be found globally from the Middle East to Asia and across Europe, where their impact stretches to art and literature. Windmills feature most famously inDon Quixoteby Cervantes but also caught the imagination of writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Hilaire Belloc and even Shakespeare; artists moved by their countenance – to various degrees of obsession – include Van Gogh, Monet, Constable, Renoir, Rembrandt, Gauguin and van Ruisdael. Many pre-industrial structures are still with us, having largely been converted into tourist attractions, housing, restaurants or bars.

Making the jump from brute force to the creation of electricity came fairly late in the day via pioneering efforts in the 19th century, after which small wind turbines became commonplace in theUSin the 1900s to supply farms in remote areas with light and other amenities (the installation at the beginning of theWizard of Oz, before it leaps into its Technicolor phase, perfectly captures the concept). The era of commercial windpower, driven by early experiments with turbines connected to the main grid supply network –including one in Scotland – would arrive in the 1970s starting in California.

In Europe, the Danes and the Germans led an initial charge in the 1980s with communities and non-utilities the main proponents; it was more of an environmental and rural movement than strictly speaking a ‘business’ and deployments were often approached on an experimental basis with the aim of advancing the technology. Egalitarian, you could almost say.

Vintage machines were nothing like the graceful structures in most modern projects, painstakingly arrayed in an eye-pleasing matrix that tumbles rhythmically with the breeze. Instead the landscape of the 1970s and early 1980s featured squatty, short-armed and often crowded turbines spinning on a sometimes wobbly axis at unfathomable speed. Two blades, three blades, facing into the wind, facing away from the wind, perched on top of lattices, wooden poles or towers made of concrete, maybe of steel segments reinforced with metal strapping; it was at times a hodgepodge.

Early machines were often called ‘tractors in the sky’ by the northern European farmers who regularly played host; that is how robust and uncomplicated – perhaps workmanlike – the inner workings of the generators were. The oldest operational machine still in existence is thought to the be Tvindkraft prototype turbine on the west coast of Denmark, which went into service in 1978 and is still chugging along with the gales tumbling in off the North Sea. That machine is not unique in its effective antiquity; it remains quite common when travelling across Europe to come across machines built in the 1980s and even now reliably producing power.

They are not alone; wind deployments across Europe ramped up in breathtaking fashion through the 1990s, smashing through the 10 gigawatt barrier in 2000 – enough to power around seven million homes – and approaching a remarkable 20 times that number as 2020 began.

For a small corner of the globe, Scotland plays a not insignificant part in the bigger picture: the more than 9,000 megawatts of total wind power installed as of the end of 2019 is on a per-capita basis roughly 4.6 times the European average – 1,698 megawatts per million residents, compared with 378 megawatts/million across theEU– and tops the league tables well ahead of the next-best performer Denmark which boasts around 1,000 megawatts per million of its wind-loving citizens.

Put another way, for every man, woman or child living in Scotland, all 5.4 million of us, there is the equivalent of a very small wind turbine producing 1.7 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power an average domestic (relatively power-hungry) dishwasher. And that adds up to alotof dishwashers, nearly two square kilometres of dishwashers if you packed them closely together or, if you stack them up, a pillar of dinner service cleanliness stretching 4,590km into the sky.

The figures – about wind, not white goods – will catch many by surprise. While it is widely acknowledged that Scotland has a healthy renewable energy industry, the specific statistics about its place in the big bad world are too often hidden withinUK-wide numbers, which, while not inconsiderable in their own right, are not in fact as impressive as what is going on north of the border. The situation is of course complicated and sometimes muddied by a sharedUKelectricity network, which allows for easy and sometimes direct export of Scottish wind power to points south, and a policy, subsidy and regulatory environment that splits responsibility – and so credit and/or blame – between London and Edinburgh. But that should not distract from what has been achieved.

It is also worth emphasising that the country’s phenomenal success, and this is crucial, must not be used as an excuse by policymakers to down tools. In the world of ten or even five years ago, there could have been a healthy debate about such a thing as ‘too much wind power’; in the era of the climate emergency, that has all changed.

The warnings of what happens if we continue to overheat our planet are familiar and regularly encompass floods, fires, famine and disease, among other nightmares. So catastrophic are some predictions that the human brain simply fails to take in additional information beyond ‘it’s gonna be bad’. Yet even the widespread societal acceptance of the latter sentiment is an improvement on where were just a few years ago, an evolution from ‘we really should get around to doing something’ and a million miles from ‘the jury is still out on climate change’.

And the realisation of just how bad things are is accelerating at an increasing rate. There is every chance the recent government-imposed deadline of 2045 for net zero emissions in Scotland (five years later for theUKas a whole) could be accelerated and, in any case, it is always good to get ahead of the curve given margins of error, room to manoeuvre etc. Every day that emissions are not reduced is a day wasted, every policy can kicked down the road is another scoop of coal on the planetary fire, each personal decision taken without reducing our individual carbon footprint is the result of false logic, and perhaps immoral (if you want to have that philosophical argument with the person sitting next to you on the airplane); time is nigh and all that.

UKadvisory body the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) stressed that very point in its 2019 Progress Report to the Scottish Parliament, in which it spelled out the need for ‘urgent action’ if net zero is to be achieved on schedule in 2045. ‘Every sector of the economy must contribute fully,’ it said.

Policies must be embedded across all levels of government with strong leadership and coordination at the centre, theCCCadded, with the public engaged in the challenge and all actions designed with people at the heart: ‘Policy should provide a clear and stable direction and a simply investable set of rules and incentives that leave room for businesses to innovate and find the most effective means of switching to low-carbon solutions.’

And the focus needs to be in the 2020s and 2030s, rather than farther down the line. Electric vehicles, green buildings, emission-lite agriculture, tree planting and peatland restoration, low-carbon heat, decarbonisation infrastructure (CO2transport and storage, hydrogen clusters, renewable electricity support), lifestyle changes: all according to theCCCare needed today.

They are not alone in the call to arms or in taking up an increasingly common refrain: in the crisis facing all of us there is no longer such a thing as too many solutions. We no longer have the luxury of choice when it comes to decarbonisation, we are going to need to full complement of human endeavour and ingenuity to salvage the planet that we have fucked up – that we continue to fuck up. Which makes it both odd and disconcerting that Scotland is not talking more about the easy win already spinning on horizons around the country, even if wind power makes some segments of the population uncomfortable in terms of knee-jerk opposition.

Edinburgh artist and poet Alec Finlay has long been intrigued by the interface between people, landscape and technological change, including renewable energy, and is not alone in believing the current crisis radically changes the baseline of the debates ahead, and the choices to be made as a result. ‘We are so far beyond arguments about whether or not people like wind,’ he said. ‘Do people like having a washing machine, do they like driving a car? That’s the way they need to start thinking about it. Those are the sort of choices you have to make in a war, and climate is now a war.’

Anyone involved in even a tangential way with the wind industry will have some experience of the atmosphere created after being asked ‘And what do you do?’ at a dinner party, wedding reception or in fact any social gathering where diverse groups of people gather around a single table. The entirely innocent question, when answered by those designing, developing, building or supplying the most visible of renewable energy technologies, inevitably results in misunderstandings from some around the table, awkward avoidance from others and outright hostility from a few.

The revelation – and this holds true in the pub, on the bus or at the school gates – is capable of generating the sort of reception usually reserved for those involved in the arms industry, the taxman (or woman), traffic wardens and tabloid journalists. Occasionally heated conversations based on misinformation and hostility can follow, roping in money, politics and climate science (and/or denial) along the way.

This does not extend to other renewables technologies to the same degree: solar power is generally better understood and more accepted, marine deployments of wave and tidal are seen as plucky, warm and fuzzy (like seals or puffins, but producing electricity), while bio-generators such as anaerobic digestion, co-firing and biomass tend to fly under the public perception radar.

Traditional generators do catch their fair share of flak, of course: nuclear has long been capable of dividing the room, coal’s days are numbered, people can get very worked up about large hydro-electric dams flooding valleys and forcing out communities while swallowing habitats. (On the flip side, you do not often see bare-knuckle confrontations about the rights or wrongs of combined-cycle gas turbines.)

Eye of the beholder: turbines in the Scottish landscape, like this array at Beinn Ghlas near Taynuilt in Argyll, are seen by some as proof positive that the country is taking a pragmatic approach to the climate challenge, while others believe that wind farms are a blot on the landscape.

© Leeming + Paterson Photography

Wind, however, is uniquely and stubbornly emotive. Some of that is about money, on which more anon, but more often it is down to visuals, views and vistas; which is why any discussion about wind must necessarily be seen in the context of Scotland’s relationship with its landscape.

The country, despite one of the most concentrated and iniquitous patterns of land ownership in Europe, has a romantic but nevertheless tangible attachment to the prospect and heritage of mountain and glen, loch and river, island and coastline. A particular estate laird or national body may strike a deal to allow a wind farm to be developed on his/her/its acreage, but it is the population as a whole that accommodates the resulting impact on views – which most would probably agree belong to all rather than one.

This ‘it is ours’ mentality, particularly in the Highlands and Islands, has roots that stretch deep into the social structure developed through the clan system, strengthened by an increasingly urban population’s relationship with the ties represented by ‘the outdoors’, and reinforced in recent years by the right to roam, which came into being in 2005 and allows for open access outwith some very narrow bands of restriction. And an individual need not be actively tramping the hills to feel that sense of collective ownership; it is part of the nationalDNAacross locals, commuters, staycationers, crofters and city-dwellers. Any project that flirts with even a marginally iconic landscape risks howls of protest from near and far in Scotland and from the diaspora elsewhere in theUKand globally. The sense of loss can be real, even if occasionally overblown or – in some instances – adopted for convenience.

That is the main reason, although certainly not the only reason, that feelings about renewables and wind power run so deep and sometimes dark and can colour all related conversations, be those in the supermarket checkout queue or in Parliament. And however elaborate the argument against a given wind farm, more often than not at its heart is that visceral dislike of the way it looks. That is why in Scotland, a full 25 years on from the first deployment of the commercial wind era, the sector remains a hot-button topic and the subject of ongoing misinformation, much mythology and basic misunderstandings of its role in a national energy system racing to adapt to the demands of the climate emergency.

It can be a hard sell. People opposed to wind cling to dogmatic perceptions like a cherished childhood teddy bear and the more the baseline changes, the deeper the fingers dig into the faux fur and stuffing. Never mind the ever-steeper requirements to curb global temperatures, the increasing demands of electrification and the no-show by other would-be low-carbon technology solutions: the vocal minority who hated wind back in the day generally hate it now.

For those so inclined, the prospect of just about any turbine being built in just about any location fuels a near-apoplectic reaction and a flurry of letter writing, reason be damned and roll on with the hyperbole: wind is too ugly, expensive, loud and inefficient; it is a con, produces more carbon than it saves, makes you sick and lowers your house price. It culls countless birds, scares away tourists and nobody likes turbines anyway. (For the record, none of those things are true. Check out the Wind Myths throughout the book for additional detail, with the usual health warnings.)

One long-time veteran of what amounts to the frontline of the wind farm battle – the ‘public exhibition’ meetings held in village halls, country hotels or sports centre at which locals are introduced to the specifics of a planned project – has spent decades fighting the industry’s corner. ‘I can in some way understand the negative reactions,’ said the community engagement expert. ‘There has been very little change in the Scottish landscape over many, many decades and suddenly there is this new element on the horizon.’

In her experience, the loudest anti voices are split between two distinct and sometimes overlapping groups: ‘There is definitely an older generation that has severe doubts about climate change and so opposes any attempt to address that; and then there is another and often related group that has moved to a given area from other places and want it to stay the same, want to see their views protected because that is the reason they came. The wider message of why change is now absolutely necessary perhaps hasn’t gotten through.’

For the latter group it is not just wind farms; grain silos, woodchip hoppers, petrol stations and housing are also in the firing line. And it matters not if a particular project meets with constantly evolving guidance on visual impacts produced by local authorities, national guidelines and/or statutory consultees.

Our engagement expert, based on years of experience, suggests that the need to embrace the low carbon economy, and wind’s role in that fight, is either intentionally tuned out or perhaps is simply not being effectively communicated by social and political interests outside the renewable energy industry, perpetuating the illusion that climate change is always someone else’s problem. ‘The onshore antis will often point to offshore wind as a better way forward. But that is an unsustainable position; we need every technology, and we need more of them.’

Profit provides another axe to grind. ‘Those opposed often complain that they are paying for the renewable energy revolution through their electricity bills and with an altered aspect out of their front windows, while wind companies get all the benefits in terms of revenue. They don’t recognise, or perhaps do not accept, the wider societal benefits.’

Some detect signs of movement. A second front-line campaigner, with a different company, believes the post-2015 shift away from government support mechanisms, and an increasing acknowledgement that onshore wind is the lowest-cost generation technology available in theUK, has made the technology more palatable to a wider slice of the population. ‘In the early days many people were convinced that their hard earned cash was going into the industry’s pockets for no return, but with the end of the subsidy era those arguments have shifted, there is now a better understanding of the benefits and role of the wind sector.’

And that knowledge extends to the wider energy mix, she believes. ‘Take the Torness nuclear power plant and the neighbouring wind farms near Edinburgh: for a long time there was no concept of what was going on inside that giant concrete box, no big green/red light on the outside to say whether it was generating or not. People just assumed it was working even when it wasn’t. But as soon as one turbine stopped spinning that raised questions about the effectiveness of wind in general.’