Natural Assets

When I heard President Trump go off on his disapproval of wind turbines in a news conference with the UK Prime Minister Stammer last month in Scotland, it reminded me of my visit to the Shetland Islands in June. This was the windiest place in my travels ever.  Besides the Shetland Ponies’ manes blowing, my hair was doing the same swirls in every direction. Driving out of the valley where we had been hiking, we were surrounded with huge white spinning turbines. There are 150 on shore making a hulking white forest, called wind farms.

On one hand, I can’t think of a better place to produce renewable energy by harnessing the natural phenomena of strong winds. Sometime the islands are called “treeless” but that is not wholly true. They do have both native and planted trees, but limited with more low trees and scrub, it’s hard to stand tall in the winds, plus very short growing season. But these giant white woodlands cover a vast amount of terrain.

How it was described to me was that in 2007 SSE Renewables undertook this very expensive project by doing a very convincing job of public relations trying to persuade the islanders with “free” energy, being the standard bearer of clean energy saving the planet and more. Further it promised of 650 jobs during the construction, contributing 125 million pounds to the economy, long term jobs for 35 and contributing 70 million pounds for local community organizations. Well, two decades later, it is the largest single ground-breaking achievement for clean energy project in Great Britain.

The Viking’s very productive project does not just cover the island’s power demand; its peak supply would give approximately eight times the consumption of the island. Because of this, there is another critical piece of infrastructure, it is an undersea cable connecting the Shetland Islands to Great Britain. This is the first physical connection to the UK mainland in the islands’ long history.  The 162 mile subsea transmission link at a cost of 1 billion pounds that will transport the generated electricity from Shetland to the mainland. The high-voltage DC cable could carry up to 600MW of power, while the islands’ average winter consumption is only 50MW the rest would be delivered to the mainland. This output is sufficient to power nearly 500,000 homes each year. It will be the most productive onshore wind farm in the UK, marking a significant increase in the UK’s clean energy capacity. But there is a problem, on the mainland they do not have the capacity to store the power being sent. Oooops!

And another is the annual household bills in the islands were often more than double the UK average of £1,700 and showed no sign of falling as a result of hosting Viking as promised. Locals say, "They're still sitting in their homes having to decide, can I afford to put on my heating, and so people are justifiably angry about that." Additionally, the islanders are also worried about Viking's impact on the landscape; the peat bog environment on which it was built; and tourism. Like most renewable projects it will generate a "community benefit fund" but islanders say the gains will be small - about £72m over 25 years - in comparison to the revenue from the windfarm.

There has also been anger on the island that the windfarm operator has received more than £2m already in "constraint payments" which pay for it not to generate power. These payments are made during times when the amount of energy being generated exceeds the capacity of the network to transfer it where it is needed – on the mainland.

I do remember standing on the tee at Royal Aberdeen Golf Club with the horizon filled with a very visible line of wind turbines off the coast. I would agree it wasn’t very attractive.

Sadly, going green is not without its challenges.