UK – Government adviser urges to build wind farms offshore

A senior government adviser on climate change is calling for more wind farms to be built offshore to prevent turbines spoiling the Scottish countryside. Alan Werritty, professor of geography at the University of Dundee, believes renewable forms of energy must be developed to reduce harmful emissions of carbon dioxide gases linked to global warming. But Werritty, who will be speaking at a major conference on tackling climate change in Scotland tomorrow, told Scotland on Sunday that there had to be more "sensitivity" about selecting sites in scenic locations. "There are problems with wind generation, particularly on siting some of the facilities on land, and I think we have to be more sensitive about that," he said. "I would favour greater use of offshore wind power generation, although I appreciate that would increase the costs." His comments will add to the debate over the Scottish Executive's lack of a national strategy over the siting of onshore wind farms.

This has led to a series of protests from local residents about wind farm development in some of the country's most beautiful rural areas, hampering plans to produce up to 40% of Scotland's electricity from renewable technologies by 2020. The siting of wind farms is now likely to be a major electoral issue in rural Scotland in the run-up to Scottish parliamentary elections in 2007. The UK has potentially the largest offshore wind resource in the world, with relatively shallow waters and strong winds extending far into the North and Irish seas. Offshore wind farms are seen by campaigners as a means of diffusing the growing number of land-based protests. Although two commercial wind power stations are already operating off the English coast, their numbers are currently dwarfed by onshore installations, which are cheaper and quicker to build. Both Sweden and Holland last week announced plans for major offshore wind farm projects in the Baltic and North Seas after facing similar environmental protests about land-based projects.

Switching the emphasis to offshore turbines in the UK would curtail claims by protest groups that Scotland's countryside is being sacrificed to meet unrealistic government renewable energy targets. In the short term, most offshore farms would have to be sited in the shallower waters off the east and west coasts of England, until deep-water technology is tested and proved. Scotland's first offshore wind farm, Robin's Rigg, is planned for the Solway Firth, but is unlikely to even enter the construction phase until next year. One Scottish wind farm protest group, Not in Northern Argyll, said it would favour more offshore wind farms if it took pressure off the scenery for which Scotland is famous. "We now have eight wind farm applications around Loch Awe alone and we just think the pressure is getting too much," said spokesman Peter Carruthers. "We have got to be more selective about onshore sites if we don't want to destroy some of Scotland's best landscapes." The one-day conference at Crieff Hydro Hotel in Perthshire - jointly organised by the Scottish Executive and Perth and Kinross Council - is the major gathering of climate change experts in Scotland prior to the G8 summit of world leaders at Gleneagles next month. Werritty said there was now a scientific consensus that human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, was contributing to global warming. "Burning fossil fuels, which produces carbon dioxide, is the major culprit driving up greenhouse gases and generating global warming," he said.