Look out, there's a monster coming
Pylons to wind turbines. From joy and awe to fear and horror
Pylons. When I was a wee boy, bouncing unsecured in the back of my dad’s old Wolseley (those endless holiday journeys, baby Ruth sleeping on the rear parcel shelf) we would sometimes play spot-the-pylon. Extra points for especially gigantic ones, soaring Meccano-istic structures bearing cables from hydro-electric and nuclear power schemes to…who knew where? Cities far away. Markets. Factories, like the vast Linwood sprawl or most of central Lanarkshire.
Sometimes we would glimpse the sources, the origins of whatever surged dangerously along those wires: Hunterston, just along the coast; Windscale, not as yet Sellafield; and the science-fiction bubble of Dounreay. Many years later I would be conducted around that decaying hulk, asked to step carefully over leaks from radioactive vessels, my body hosed down before leaving. And there were the dams, the stories about Ben Cruachan being hollowed out. Power stations in glass, concrete and stone. Giant pipes slithering down mountainsides.
As a child, I was thrilled, or thrilled by my parents’ awe: that humans could tap into such elemental energy, and build accordingly, massively. There was nothing negative or scary about all this brutalist technology. We felt a kind of love. Joy in accomplishment.
When it came to windpower, I was ready to welcome it: how could you argue? It was clean, necessary to the future of the planet. There was something beautiful about those whirling blades, as you whisked by. The first time I saw a flickering clutch of wind generators was in the USA, in New Hampshire in the early 1980s, and it looked friendly. It looked like the future. By that time fears over Edge of Darkness radioactivity had all but doomed nuclear power. Hydro was a sleeping giant. Tidal and wavepower were uncertain as the sea.
For Shetland, the Viking Windfarm project promised so much when it was first announced in 2005. A community partnership with SSE and a local company that, with a whirl of blades, would secure the post-oil future of the islands. But a series of legal challenges by anti-windfarm campaigners (concerns ranged from the annihilation of birdlife through pollution of local watercourses to the massive destruction of peatbogs) saw the Shetland Charitable Trust pull out and the size of the development reduced from 155 (reduced!) to 103 turbines. There will also be a high voltage interconnector cable to the Scottish mainland, a converter station and a possible battery storage park. And so it began.
I was initially shocked by the amount of peat being removed as new roads were constructed and the giant stretch of empty bog known as the Lang Kames was gradually turned into a building site. But people get used to things like that in Shetland, which has dealt with all kinds of mainland impositions, from the military infrastructure and manpower of the First, Second and Cold Wars to the commercial development related to North Sea and Atlantic hydrocarbons. Colossal civil engineering work, tens of thousands of people. They come; they go.
But about two months ago, when the first towers began to rise from the gouged and concreted peat, and especially when the blades, huge beyond belief, started passing up the roads on the biggest lorries I’ve ever seen…everything changed for me. These were totally alien arrivals. It was genuinely intimidating to watch these…creatures rising, day by day, dominating the landscape I’d known and…not loved, but accepted as part of myself and my home for so long.
Because these things are big. It’s 155 metres from base to the blade tip at its highest arc. The hub height of 96.5 metres and each blade is 57 metres. Forget big. They are colossal. Monstrous. There are so many. And so many more to come.
The blades are not turning yet. It will be next year before the much-feared flicker, the risk of bird strikes, begins. The noise will definitely be a factor, even in a place where the howl and clatter of gales is an everyday fact of life. The other day I was in an idyllic, isolated garden, wondering why I could hear the sound of racing motorcycles, constantly. It was from two small wind turbines on the other side of the valley.
There will be some benefits for the community, despite no direct investment. a Community Benefit fund has £400,000 a year to donate to local projects during construction, and £2.2 million a year once the windfarm begins generation. A drop in the ocean compared to what might have been.
There remain concerns about the amount of peat excavated, concrete poured, fibreglass and steel manufactured, transportation used, and whether the carbon release caused will really be compensated by the ‘clean’ energy generated. Trout have been wiped out by silt run-off in at least one watercourse. But for me, It’s just so hard to cope with what the whole thing looks like. It reminds me of the movie District 9, when an extraterrestrial mothership arrives over Johannesburg, dominating and changing everything. Someone said to me last week: “It’s a miracle there’s been no sabotage.”
Sometimes it feels that Shetland is just a gigantic resource for multinational companies and indifferent governments. Oil, gas, the disturbing and highly militarised space station in Unst, even industrial fish farming. But this? With more land-based windpower developments on the way, not to mention those even bigger ones offshore, Shetland is becoming a rechargeable battery anchored between the North Sea and the Atlantic.
Maybe we’ll learn to love it, or at least to live with it. Maybe. I scarcely take in Scotland’s thousands of pylons these days. But a whole load of new ones will be going through the Tingwall Valley soon. I bet I notice them.
Same spectacle in Kintyre…too many, too big, too little/local benefit…Holyrood overrules all dissent…makes one turn a little less green sadly…