Kenny Logan thinks as well as he dances – engagingly but without connecting up the limbs of an argument.
Logan today publicly joined the ranks of the Beauly-Denny power line protesters. In the best of the Nimby tradition one would expect a macho guy to avoid, he is enraged because part of the line will run through his farm in Stirling.
He is threatening legal action to try to compel Scottish & Southern Energy to put his part of the line underground (the rest can go hang) and the whole thing has put him off Scottish independence for good. So there.
Protest on this matter is generating enough heat to require the use of the new power line all by itself.
The basic situation is actually quite clear and detest pylons as we all do, the logic is irresistible.
Earning our way
Independent or not, Scotland needs to generate income to drive the services and economic development its people need to live here.
The single greatest natural asset Scotland has is its sources of renewable energy – 25% of Europe’s needs could be supplied from here. Unlike oil, this supply will keep on coming. We can sell it to a known and needy market and we can keep on selling it.
Clean or dirty?
Here is a revenue generator that can be relied on to contribute endlessly to the Scottish economy – and it’s clean. It does not produce toxic waste material we cannot neutralise or safely dispose of beyond all risk of leakage.
With the nuclear power that is the only alternative to the development of clean renewable energies, it is beyond doubt that we will leave behind us a time bomb for which our descendents will curse our memories as they come to suffer from it.
The cost of lunch
As they say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The current National Grid was not constructed to receive significant power inputs from multiple sources in remote areas. As it stands, it is nowhere near fit for the purposes we will shortly need it to fulfill.
We need to rebuild most of it to increase its capacity to a degree which is future-proofed in being able to receive the volumes of renewable energy we will generate with increasing efficiency.
We will need subsea interconnectors between parts of our mainland and our islands; and we will need them between ourselves and other countries with whom we will share and to whom we will sell our power.
Our immediate need, though, is for a grid that can receive and transmit mainland-based power – and this raises the question of using overhead or underground installations to carry it.
Underground cables are aesthetically preferable of course – but they are expensive and they have their ecological downside. As the Technical Assessor for the Beauly-Denny line reported in his findings, they have a negative environmental impact which is not aesthetic but actual – in the disruption to the land caused by their construction.
Equally, in cases of power failures, where repairs on overhead installations do not negatively impact yet again on the environment, those on faulty underground cabling require the land to be newly dug up.
The big issue
The bottom line, which no one can either deny or change for the better, is that there is no money in Scotland’s budget for anything beyond the strictly necessary; nor will there be for a very considerable time.
Thanks to Gordon Brown’s refusal to adopt a robust regulatory regime and the irresponsibility of the banks in seizing the opportunity of every unscrutinised gamble imaginable – we, like the rest of the UK, are in hock for as far ahead as we can see.
Nor can we borrow. Unlike every local authority, the Scottish Government has no powers to borrow so it is dependent for its capital expenditure on whatever budget it is given from Westminster. There’s little money in that kitty and for petty political reasons, there is no apparent will to make any easement available to Scotland anyway.
So we’re in for pylons and an overhead installation to upgrade our grid – or we’re into missing yet another opportunity for Scotland to earn its keep and secure its future. D’oh!
The new Beauly-Denny line
With the new Beauly-Denny line which Energy Minister Jim Mather, Argyll’s MSP, has just approved, we will have a far more capable section of the grid essential to the first renewable energy schemes targeted to come onstream.
Beyond that, we will have something less aesthetically invasive than the current overhead line and running mainly on a similar route.
How come?
- Greater capability: the new 137 mile long overhead line will be a 400kV double circuit line, replacing the existing single circuit 132kV line – and providing more reliable capacity. Of the two new circuits, one will operate at 400kV, providing a high capacity circuit between Beauly and Denny. The other will run at 275kV, providing a circuit which will receive much of the power generated in the area between Beauly and Denny.
- Fewer towers: the current overland power line southwards from Beauly has 815 pylons or towers. The new line will have around 600 towers – 25% fewer.
- Greater spacing: the distance between the towers on the existing line is 250 metres. In the upgraded line the separation between towers will be 360 metres. The towers will be higher in order to enable the use of fewer of them – 53 metres on average as opposed to 33 metres in the current line.
- Dismantling of current line: this will go during construction of the new line, which will mostly be within one kilometre of the old one.
- Less presence in the National Park: the new line will have significantly less presence in the Cairngorms National Park. Previously there were 35kms of the main power line running through he park. With the new line, this will come down to 28 kms; and the 128 pylons will drop to 76. In addition – as detailed in the next point, a lot of feeder line connecting to the main line in the park will be removed in a streamlined system.
- Less wirescape: in what is known – for obvious reasons - as ‘wirescape’, no fewer than 86 kilometres of existing secondary power lines and poles will be removed with the new system. This will be done through five requirements to improve the landscape at the specific sensitive locations of Stirling, Cairngorms National Park, Balblair (Highland), Errochty (Highland) and Muthill (Perthshire).
- Aesthetic protection: three areas will have special measures employed to protect them additionally against the visual impact of the line: the Stirling area; Glenside farm near Plean; and Auchilhanzie House near Crieff.
- Environmental and social protection: conditions set by the Minister to limit environmental and social disruption during and after construction include: noise limitation; the maintenance of air quality; appropriate traffic management; protection of the water environment; avoidance of work in bird breeding seasons; the introduction, after the construction phase, of a bird monitoring programme in sensitive areas; and protection for otters, bats, wildcats, pine martins, red squirrels, water voles and reptiles.
There is also an economic uplift from the work on the construction of the line. Ofgem estimates the investment necessary for the overhead line project as around £330 million.
Scottish & Southern Energy calculates that the project will require between 250 and 300 people working on it at any one time; and that this will rise to between 450 and 500 at peak periods in construction.
The timeline is for the upgraded line to be in place within 10 years. Construction must begin within four years and electricity transmission should begin within six years of the start of construction.
Sleight-of-hand reporting
What has been disturbing is the way the contrary view has been reported. Usually reliable media have been running deceptive stories such as the claim that the tallest of the new towers will be little different from that of the height of the Wallace Memorial at Stirling.
While this is true – where both structures are measured from a start at ground level – the eye of the mind of those hearing this claim will not see both structures starting from the same point. They will see the new tallest tower starting from the floor of the Carse of Stirling, rising to the base of the Wallace Memorial and soaring upwards from there to equal its height – a monstrous – and entirely fictional, construction.
Conclusion
In an ideal world we would all have jobs, have clean renewable energy from invisible sources and live in a secure and prosperous country that earned money effortlessly.
But post Thatcher, Blair and Brown:
- Scotland has no manufacturing industries.
- The public sector is our biggest employer – a spender not a revenue generator.
- Our oil revenues have been squandered without investment for the future.
- Our key natural resources of water and power have almost all been sold off to to the private sector, often extra-nationally.
- Our transport infrastructure is appallingly degraded.
- There has been no thoroughgoing strategic infrastructural investment of any kind for a long time.
- We have a small, dispersed and ageing population.
- And we’re broke.
So we have a choice.
We can accept what is aesthetically less than desirable – although familiar enough already – in the interests of building an economically active Scotland with a future to attract investment.
We can preserve the aesthetics for the benefit of the relatively few and accept a future as a slave state, making do with whatever we are given, increasingly dependent on such handouts and accepting a lower standard of living, with our young folk leaving for a better life elsewhere.
This option will see us eventually in a position with a pristine but empty country where that famous Sun headline will come into its own: ‘Will the last person to leave, please turn out the lights’. Except that there won’t be any lights to turn out.
Of course the Energy Minister has made the only possible decision in the circumstances – and he has hedged it with actual environmental improvement and with as much protection as possible.
For us, this is a ‘get real’ moment, a no-brainer.
For Kenny Logan, it’s a no-brainer too. But then the poor lad has spent too long in the scrum.
Super assessment. Puts to shame the scandalous distortion that is being coordinated throughout virtually all of Scotland’ s media
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If only our foresight was as clear as hindsight. So often we hear on the doorstep yes Scotland could have been independent if only we had taken our chance on the oil boom of the 70′s. Now they tell us, it is too late.
If only they could see the new energy boom that Scotland can benefit from. It will be bigger than oil. We have to be up there leading the race to develop the technologies for electriciy generation of the future. We also need the infrastructure in place to meet the requirements of distributed electricity generation.
The Scottish Government are signalling that they are determined that Scotland will benefit from the revolution that is just starting.
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Some interesting perspective, but the article goes wrong with the blind assertion that “renewable” means “clean”. Not so, when, in the course of implementing it, you dig up a peat-bog (takes 1000yr to evolve its own ecosystem) in order to plant a windfarm (expected life-span 20yr) (cf Lewis). Remind me, *what* environment was it we’re trying to protect again? And just because Scotland may have resources to power a quarter of Europe, does that mean we should?
I’d *far* rather have solar panels on all roofs, complete with government infrastructure to explain the grants system and point to authoritative resources and useful contacts; do my own bit, as everyone should, with a principle of “you use it, you produce it”: plonk the bloody windfarms either around towns or out to sea rather than exploiting the countryside.
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For Tim:
Of course little is completely ‘clean’ but the big choice is between clean and dirty.
The nuclear lobby – which has major and self-centred business interests behind it, is pushing hard. If those supporting clean energy cannot muster a common front to support renewable energy development, the profiteers will drive between us and we’ll not only get the nuclear provision Scotland does not want, we’ll get the nation’s waste buried deep below the seabed south of Barra – which is where the UK Government wants to put it.
The degrading of small footprints in large peat bogs becomes peripheral in the face of the toxic waste legacy Scotland would inherit in generations to come, leaking in the Minch and swept ashore by the Atlantic.
We have to choose our poison. One is survivable and one is not.
Nothing is perfect but this is a growing-up moment for all of us. There are compromises to be made and we need to grasp the imperative of making the least damaging ones.
For Argyll has argued for wind turbines to be urban located where possible and to run alongside major roads as they do in the Netherlands. However, as with Shetland, some of the most productive areas of wind are in remote rural places. We will need to develop both such types of location.
Offshore wind farms and marine tidal energy systems (the real gold mine) will progressively become very significant but there are initial problems to be overcome such as salt corrosion and safe access for maintenance.
You may know, Tim and you’ll certainly be interested, that the Scottish Association of Marine Science outside Oban is engaged in major research on ‘soundscaping’ – discovering how marine mammals and fish ‘perceive’ their environment through soundwaves and how they ‘manage’ the picture they ‘see’. This will be important in the development and locating of marine turbines.
The problem with solar panels is their payback time. There is actually no need for them to cost anything like as much as they do – this is another example of the profit motive strangling social need. But the country cannot earn money from using solar panels.
We can all spend money but unless Scotland starts earning serious revenue, the country can only decline. Each small enterprise is important but we need the basal economic security of reliable major earning sources – and we don’t have a lot of possibilities to choose from.
The North Sea Grid idea, which Scotland proposed and Europe is supporting enthusiastically, will not only give us a market for our power, it will secure our power with provision from a system to which many countries contribute.
If you can see sources of comparable and enduring production revenues for Scotland – and identifying these is the challenge for all of us – everyone will fall upon you in delight.
Scotland is moving into a new mode where, perhaps alone in the UK, it is becoming prepared to invest for the future, to lay down a sustainable base to support the growth of a national economy into the medium and long term.
Speaking only for ourselves, we’re seizing on this mood like thirst-driven desert refugees. Short termism has progressively destroyed Britain and there’s no sign, except in Scotland and perhaps in Wales, of a will to think and act differently.
The very real challenges around renewable energy development are central to this moment. It doesn’t mean that we go for it with brutal disregard – the Government rejected the plan for the massive wind farm on Lewis – but we do have to pay for our lunch.
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If the pylons “destroy” our scenery they can always be dismantled. The scenery will still be there.
Scotland’s greatest asset is not our wind or waves but our water.
We must insure that it is kept as a national asset in public control.
Would you be happy for your water to be passed by privateers and asset strippers?
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For Graeme:
Could not agree more.
The Government has kept Scottish Water as a Scottish-owned resource – but we’d already sold off a lot of our water to outside private sector energy generation companies – like Scottish & Southern. This is a very real concern.
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I know that its nitpicking but as a rugby fan I must point out that Kenny Logan was a winger and as such did not participate in the scrums. He doesn’t even have that excuse!
For the remainder of the article I couldn’t agree more with For Argyll.
A well written well argued article!!
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For Dorothy Macdonald – re Kenny Logan being a winger:
Thanks, Dorothy.We should have checked his position before we took off on that metaphor – which was a bit of a cheapshot anyway.
It would be dishonest to cover up our mistake but let’s say that the last line of the piece should now read: ‘But he’s well used to winging it’.
Hope you’ll settle for that, Dorothy.
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Great article. Far more needs to be made of the point that under-grounding the cables would have a substantially greater environmental impact than that of a series of pylons. Forty meter strips of ground dug deep and filled with cables, concrete and in-fill will destroy habitat and biodiversity; pylons, while visible to the eye, will have far, far less of an impact. Furthermore, they can be removed if need be and the land restored by-and-large to its previous state; but once under-grounding takes place, its effects can never be reversed.
Pylons are the way to go, they are necessary evil and the SNP government was absolutely right to permit them.
Let’s also remember that sections of the route which are currently messy and an eyesore will be rationalised and improved, and some of the route will be re-routed so as to reduce visual impact in some more sensitive areas. What’s also worth keeping in mind is the fact that while the highest tower will be 200m in height, they’re not all going to be that high; indeed many will simply be the same height as the highest ones already out there in the Cairngorms…
As for sea-based cables, the cost would be astronomical and, as with everything, this would have to be paid for by tax and consumer bills; it was never a workable option. Also, what impact on the seabed? Again, it’s the old “so long as I can’t see it, it doesn’t matter” chestnut.
In terms of procedure, S.37 of the Electricity Act relates to overhead lines, not under-grounding. While requesting under-grounding may (and it is a ‘may’) have been possible under the associated deemed planning consent, it was simply not possible for the Scottish Government to direct sections to be under-grounded without refusing the entire S.37 application. That would have been a massive blow to Scotland’s renewable generation targets. People, like Logan, need to first understand the framework surrounding the application before criticising procedure. Remember, also, that it was the pre-2007 Labour/Lib-Dem Executive who started the ball rolling on the Beauly/Denny line and set it off in the direction it’s been going in.
So, as the NIMBYs rise to challenge, let’s remember that the option permitted, unless we all reduce our energy consumption (which, at this point in time, will never happen) was necessary and the only option available. Let’s also remember that ALL parties in the Scottish Parliament (incl. the Green Party) supported the application and would have approved it. This should not be an anti-SNP issue; no matter how the opposition try to play it…
As for Kenny Logan, what does he know about planning, engineering and biodiversity? Nothing. He should stick to punting rugby balls about…
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Only the second thoughtful and considered article that I have managed to read on this topic -the first was from Gillian Bowditch in Sunday Times of 9th January -accessible on the web. Believe me I have cause to look in the course of my work! We really are very ill served by our press and media.
Of course the huge and diverse range of alternative and renewable sources of energy have to be investigated and these are well covered by a range of informed contributors as above. David Baldwin’s caveats about undergrounding are well made. I wonder how much value would be lopped off Kenny Logan’s farm in the largely artificially engineered Carse of Stirling if such a trench was to be driven through the fertile ground. Others have seriously suggested that the battlefield of Sheriffmuir would be less affected by undergrounding!
One of my friends, an architect with vision and talent, suggests that if we require to use pylons we should be looking to make these a feature rather than a scar on our landscape. Anyone who has seen the impact of a well designed bridge or building will see that our footprint on our countryside need not be negative. Our cousins from Scandinavia who have a particular talent for design apparently are much more imaginative in their pylon models.As in so many ways we could learn from others.
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Not sure who David Baldwin is, but thanks to Kenneth MacColl for supporting my comments on under-grounding!
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Sorry about that! Should have looked closer! Strange how all the faculties seem to degenerate at the same time.
“But man, am I no a bonnie fechter?”
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Excellent article, real journalism digging into the facts behind the story rather than the dog eared political hackery of much of this country’s Fourth Estate.
We elect governments to lead and take difficult decisions in the national interest and Jim Mather has done just that.
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@ Tim: As Newsroom says your idea of people generating electricity for their own consumption is not presently viable given payback times etc. However, you might like to know that there is a very interesting project with regard to communities creating their own windfarms – so just a step away from your idea. The Neilston Development Trust is putting up four 2KW turbines to generate revenue for their community. As I understand it that revenue will be ploughed into community eco projects — they’ll calling it the ‘Power Down’ project. While they may not be using the power they generate themselves, they’ll be utilising the benefit to support what was a declining community. They’re using a brownfield site to boot. It seems to me that plonking windfarms in the middle of scenic areas was always bound to be contentious, but if these installations are sensitively done by the communities themselves and make these same fragile rural communities sustainable, probably for the first time since before the First World War, we all might have to accept projects like this powerline are absolutely essential.
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