John McLellan | The Scotsman – Why the renewable energy battle is all about SNP blame shifting

Why the renewable energy battle is all about SNP blame shifting

It has been a depressingly constant feature of the SNP’s 18 years in charge at Holyrood that every cock-up, misstep or abject failure is ultimately the fault of Westminster, or at the very least not as bad as some other part of the United Kingdom.

Claiming the credit for anything that works and no responsibility for anything which doesn’t is just part and parcel of devolution when different parties are in control of the two parliaments.

When ex-Scotland secretary Alister Jack blocked the Gender Recognition Reform Act and the deposit return scheme, it didn’t matter that both interventions had overwhelming public support. The SNP and Greens still howled with outrage.

It disnae matter, they’ve disrespected devolution and democracy – while many SNP supporters quietly recognised Mr Jack got them off the hook.

Even the seemingly more co-operative approach to the UK government in First Minster John Swinney’s business speech this week ─ particularly the attempt to create a graduate visa scheme to allow overseas students to work in Scotland after finishing their studies ─ is really just another attempt to put floundering Labour in the same bracket as the vanquished Tories as unreasonable and unwilling to accommodate the will o’ the Scottish people.

Agree to it and the SNP takes the credit. Reject it, as the Home Office has already done, and Labour gets the blame.

Meet the new London boss, same as the old London boss, and we’ll no doubt be hearing more about that as next year’s Scottish Parliament election nears.

There is no better example of blame shifting than the battles currently being fought by small communities against the onward march of renewable energy schemes, be it the infrastructure needed to get the juice from the vast reefs of offshore turbines ringing the coastline, the battery farms needed for storage, or onshore windfarms on previously scenic hillsides.

The turbines are certainly money spinners, with UK consumers trousering up £390 million in constraint payments to Scottish wind farm operators last year, according to the Renewable Energy Foundation think tank. It’s literally money for doing nothing, and as businesses count the cost of Friday’s gales and mini lockdown, energy companies counted the revenue for turning off their turbines.

At the heart of every wrangle over renewable energy planning applications is the Scottish Government’s National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4), the ‘New Testament’ of the unfalsifiable climate change religion that guides the SNP’s bid to reach net zero paradise by 2030.

Yet in a Scottish Parliament debate about consents for energy infrastructure this week, acting minister for climate action Alasdair Allan was at pains to blame Westminster energy policies for the approval of projects in the face of fierce local opposition.

“Although land use and planning in Scotland are devolved, the powers to legislate for the generation, transmission, distribution and supply of electricity are reserved to the UK government,” he said, as if NPF4 had nothing to do with his administration’s approach to energy generation. As Conservative MSP Douglas Lumsden pointed out, if SNP ministers can use planning powers to kill off nuclear power in Scotland on ideological grounds, they can block energy schemes if they want, even if, like nuclear, they make a massive contribution to net zero.

Planning officers tremble at the mention of NPF4, its terms seemingly so absolute that it is futile to resist. Policy 11 is key, stating that landscape and visual impacts “are to be expected for some forms of renewable energy”, and if the impact is localised, and/or some attempt has been made to limit the effect, “they will generally be considered to be acceptable”. Concerns about grid capacity are to be ignored, and the result is applications are recommended for approval even if there are justifiable reasons for refusal.

Mr Lumsden cited Canadian firm Boralex’s Clashindarroch Extension plan for 22 turbines and a battery storage facility in the remote Cabrach area, despite overwhelming opposition from residents, against which Moray Council failed to lodge a formal objection even though the chief planning officer recognised it would introduce a “significantly more intrusive built development into the simple and secluded basin” with “significant adverse effects”. Why? Because councillors were advised that objection would lead to the council having to fund a public inquiry after which, thanks to NPF4, the application would be approved anyway.

And indeed, that’s what is about to happen in the Borders, where a public inquiry gets underway on Monday after councillors threw out a 14-turbine wind farm scheme at Greystone Knowe near Heriot.

Like Clashindarroch, the officers recommended approval, but this time councillors recognised local unhappiness and ignored the advice. Both applications are opposed by the Ministry of Defence. That seemingly counts for nothing even though SNP ministers claim their hands are tied by Westminster.

And that comes back to Mr Swinney’s business speech last week, in which he also extoled the virtues and opportunities of Scotland’s energy sector, but also acknowledged some community concerns.

“They can see the turbines and the infrastructure, but wonder where the benefit is for them,” he said.

“That is simply not good enough.”

But that Trump-esque transactional attitude does not recognise that some communities don’t want their landscape despoiled at any cost, no matter how big the corporate bribe may be.

That’s certainly the case in the Cabrach where no deal will be enough because the community is already home to 78 turbines in a six-mile radius, with a further 21 consented, and benefits promised by one developer, Infinenergy at the Dorenell windfarm, were not fully honoured.

These people are not the NIMBYs Keir Starmer has in his sights, and proposed changes to the Scottish consent system must properly recognise that sometimes enough is enough.

John is a senior consultant at Media House International (MHI) and the views of the column are John McLellan’s and not that of MHI.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/why-the-renewable-energy-battle-is-all-about-snp-blame-shifting-4962892

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