Letters / Cut the energy waste before building new wind farms
‘A Shetland councillor has warned of growing negativity towards the ambitious ORION clean energy project if “we don’t get the communication right”.’
I saw this intro on a recent Shetland News item attributed to councillor Davie Sandison and it appeared as I had just finished this letter, so I edited it to include it, as it was significantly relevant:
The gullible, those that don’t really care about Shetland, the less well informed, those set to gain personally and those who had their heads in the sand, were indeed led to believe that the destruction and environmental vandalism that the corporate energy mafia is inflicting on our hills was for the environmentally friendly production of electricity.
Some of us knew better and saw the lies and profit/subsidy driven propaganda for what it was and is. Now that the destruction is becoming clear for all to see, many more folk have since joined the various groups hostile to this landscape vandalism against Shetland’s natural environment.
The big thing for me is the widely accepted knowledge both within and outwith the energy industry that over half of all energy generated and bought in to the UK, including the renewable mix, is wasted.
The figures in a study conducted in 2015 revealed an annual figure of 55 per cent energy waste, worth a calculated £9 billion per annum.
Similar studies have shown this waste to be roughly the same in most western countries, so it is easy to see by folk with no vested interests that energy companies are specifically driven by the profits of selling as much energy as they can push down the cables, with considerations on efficiency, energy conservation and waste etc noticeable by their absence.
Shetland never needed this monstrosity and never will because all it will do, in absence of dealing with the huge waste energy issue, is add to the waste.
Then as many more unnecessary wind farms join in, the energy mafia will rake in huge sums as compensation when asked to shut down due to too much wind for the national grid to cope with.
The greed and what feeds it is too ingrained now but a far better environmental method, a more efficient and less destructive way to cut fossil fuel energy generation, would have be to stop the waste energy problem first, then shut the dirty generation down whilst a proper study of our future energy needs is undertaken, resulting in a UK wide energy policy and accompanying strategies.
The dash for so much wind generation is an utter scam and on the increase because of the “turn off payments”. That’s the reason for a wind farm and nothing at all to do with environmental best practice or lowering carbon footprints.
Like the Tories taking back control, promising to re-establishing the great British Empire with Brexit, the wind farm part of the renewable energy scam is just another example of leading the masses up the garden path.
So, Davie Sandison is right to express concern at the wholesale industrialisation of Shetland.
Good on you, Davie, for expressing concerns now but it’s a bit late. The SIC is creeping up the list of enemies of the state of Shetland with the SNP Scottish Government the supreme enemy of the people for maintaining a planning system rigged entirely in favour of the developer and barring the communities most affected to any involvement in the rotten process.
Vic Thomas
Catfirth
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