The answer, my Hebridean friend, is blowing in the wind

The answer, my Hebridean friend, is blowing in the wind
Magnus Linklater
We cannot tilt against the best renewable source
The objection was heartfelt — authentic, obdurate, plangent in its complaint. It came from a Hebridean islander, speaking up for his land and his heritage. His is a remote community, confronting industrial development on a massive scale, fighting for its right to peace, tranquillity and the undisturbed beauty of an ancient landscape. Finlay MacLeod was adamant that a plan to erect 180 giant turbines on the island of Lewis, making it the largest wind farm in Europe, should be stopped — in the name of civilisation itself. “If this goes ahead,” he said, “in ten years, people will be saying: how did we allow this horror to happen?”

He chose a bad day to protest. Even as he spoke, environmentalists were digesting the latest doomsday prediction on global warming. The Arctic, they said, is melting so fast that within the next 30 years the North Pole will have lost its icecap; during the summer months, ships will be able to sail across the top of the world; worse, deprived of its reflecting surface, the oceans will start absorbing more sunlight, accelerating the warming process at a rate that threatens ecological disaster on a scale almost impossible to contemplate.

Faced with climate change of this speed, where do we stand on wind farms? Is it any longer tenable to wring our hands about intrusive pylons when the very survival of the countryside we care so much about is at stake? More to the point, does the man from Lewis, whose moorland view is about to be disturbed, have the right to stand in the way of an energy producer, which is one of the only currently available sources that is free of carbon emissions?

The farthest-flung wilderness areas of the country now stand in the front line of our defences against this environmental Armageddon. It is, however, no longer enough to argue the case against wind farms on aesthetic grounds. There is no point in worrying about the revolving propeller that breaks the skyline on some distant mountain, when, down in the valley, the water is closing over our heads. In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes once said, we are all dead. Except that this long run has now become quite terrifyingly short.

The well-intentioned case against wind farms has been made often enough, and frequently on these pages. It has even been eloquently put by the environmentalist James Lovelock. As a resident of West Devon, he is strangely reluctant to see his beloved hedgerows and meadows sacrificed to the political demands that every source of renewable energy must be exploited.

“Perhaps we are Nimbys,” he writes, “but we see these urban politicians as like some unthinking physicians who have forgotten their Hippocratic Oath, and are trying to keep alive a dying civilisation by useless and inappropriate chemotherapy when there is no hope of a cure, and the treatment renders the last stage of life unbearable.”

I am with the unthinking physicians on this one. It is their responsibility to find every possible means to keep us alive, rather than to make the sunset years of Professor Lovelock that little bit more agreeable. We know that wind farms are inefficient, we understand that they carve up the land, that they require pylons marching across the countryside to transport their output to the urban centres that need it, that they will never, on their own, produce enough to meet the national demand. Only last week a study by the Renewable Energy Foundation confirmed this pessimistic view, reporting that only in southern Scotland, offshore and in the islands of the north did wind-farm production exceed the Government’s target of 30 per cent capacity. In Lovelock country — Cornwall and Devon — the levels achieved were only about 24 per cent.

Pessimistic the predictions may be, but right now wind energy is the only renewable show in town. Personally, I prefer a 24 per cent achievement to the alternative, which is zero. Those who argue against wind farms talk knowingly about the use instead of nuclear energy, bio-mass, wind and tidal power or burying carbon emissions from coal deep in the ocean bed. They are all needed, and they all require massive investment if our planet is to be saved. But no one envisages them being available in less than 20 years. Wind energy will be a vital component in the alternative energy mix, whatever the future holds, and to oppose it on conservation grounds is frivolous.

Conserving what exactly? Natural beauty? Our rural heritage? Wildlife? Organisations such as Scottish National Heritage, and its English and Welsh equivalents, have stopped many viable wind farms on the grounds that the odd sea eagle or hen harrier may one day collide with a revolving turbine. But when the temperatures rise, the seas roll inland, the trees wither and the moorland retreats, we will not be talking about the survival of the odd sea eagle — we will be lamenting the disappearance of entire species. That is the moral case our so-called conservation bodies should be facing, and that is the one they are so cravenly avoiding.

Most experts assume that the lifespan of the average wind turbine is about 30 years. At that point it can be removed. What is not removable is the steady warming of our planet, with all the dangers that poses to this and future generations. To the man from Lewis, I say this: I would rather face the so-called “horror” of an unsightly turbine in ten years time than try to explain, 30 years from now, why we stood back, did nothing and watched the earth disintegrate.