Letters / Good luck
May I wish Energy Isles all the luck in the world for their quest to build a self-financed wind farm (Firms plot big wind farm in Yell and Unst; SN, 26/02/14).
However, their proposed large wind farm, which will be scattered through Yell and Unst, doesn’t in the first instance depend on a Viking wind farm cable to the national grid.
A grid connection does not guarantee them planning consent and the Viking wind farm on its own isn’t big enough to make a cable financially viable.
Their proposed 200 MW wind farm cannot be built until it successfully meets all the planning regulations, satisfies all the statutory consultees and gets through the almost inevitable public local inquiry. Many years further down the line the final plans will need to be passed by a Scottish energy minister.
This process will of course cost the developers millions of their own money, which they could eventually lose if their planned consent was refused.
Sadly for them if this was to happen there would be no public money from the Shetland Charitable Trust to bail them out.
I think this group is very brave in announcing a commitment to invest in what appears to be a dying industry in the UK and abroad.
A growing list of companies has recently cut back plans to build both offshore and onshore wind capacity in Britain.
SSE (the majority shareholder in Viking Energy) has scrapped two wind farm projects on mainland Scotland citing financial reasons and those sites don’t require a horrendously expensive 300 kilometre cable to connect them to the national grid.
A project the size of the Yell and Unst wind farm (or Viking for that matter) will require a very large degree of borrowed capital and this will be extremely difficult for a small company to find for an industry that appears to have passed its peak.
Last year the British government cut subsidies to support the development of onshore wind. Recently, Denmark’s Dong Energy, Germany’s EON and Abu Dhabi state-owned investor Masdar decided to scrap a project to expand the London Array, the World’s largest offshore wind farm.
RWE and Iberdrola-owned Scottish Power have also scrapped or scaled back huge offshore wind farm projects.
By the time both the planned large scale wind farms could be completed on Shetland and cable-connected to the national grid the big power companies and their investors will have moved on.
By 2020, if their predictions are correct, the UK will be awash with comparatively cheap fracked gas and they won’t be buying expensive wind power from hundreds of miles away.
It would be sad to see local companies lose money on a delusional dream when an investment in sensible, fit for scale, local renewable projects would be more worthy of investment and have a better chance of planning consent.
Allen Fraser
Meal
Hamnavoe
Burra
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