AS Andy Burnham is elevated into high office without a contest, he’s received much plaudits for his commitment to reconstructing the constitution and reviving Labour’s commitment to progressive social policy. He is arriving into office on a sea of goodwill just as his predecessor is unceremoniously ejected.
Sam Bright at DeSmog writes: “However, the enthusiasm for Burnham’s coronation is being somewhat dampened by reports that he is going to adopt a more lenient approach to North Sea exploration than his predecessor.
“That is despite the now overwhelming economic benefits of accelerating the clean energy transition, the almost non-existent domestic energy advantages of exploiting the declining basin, and the public’s growing concern – amid a seemingly never-ending heatwave – with climate change.”
Whether it’s an effort to appease the far right, or succumbing to the misplaced idea that opening up the North Sea will help reduce bills, the energy policy and system in Britain is a complete shambles.
Take, for example, the vast MachairWind farm proposed for south of Iona, which will be visible from Iona, Mull, Staffa, Islay, Jura and Colonsay. It’s difficult to convey the sheer scale of the development. Imagine 144 giant structures as tall as the Eiffel Tower scattered across the seascape.
It will be an enormous industrial process to construct, and will destroy the tranquillity of some of Scotland’s most beautiful and revered places, and, after decommissioning, the concrete platforms will remain on the seabed forever.
The National Trust for Scotland, which owns Staffa and Iona, will be objecting. It issued a statement saying: “The National Trust for Scotland supports the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, needed to both address climate change and to help restore nature.
“However, we are concerned that the location and scale of the proposed Machair Wind development will cause unacceptable environmental damage. In particular we are concerned by the anticipated impact on marine life, bird life, and on landscapes and seascapes. Given these concerns, we intend to object to the proposed development.”
They're quite right. It would be an irreversible change to one of Europe’s most celebrated Atlantic seascapes. But who benefits and how does it work?
The Crown Estate Scotland leases the seabed. Iberdrola builds the turbines. The electricity goes south.
As for who benefits, it’s slim pickings. Fiona Brunton from Calgary, Mull has written: “Scottish Power Renewables (SPR) has confirmed it will not commit to community benefit before consent is granted. Current indications include potential for grants of up to £500, and five apprenticeships across the whole of Argyll and Bute.”
For the avoidance of any doubt, that is shocking and derisory. Residents are being asked to give up their cultural heritage, their marine biodiversity, their dark skies, and their visitor economy, in return for pennies.
The whole debacle exposes the grim farce that is UK energy policy as played out in Scotland. We have the double-whammy of losing key assets such as Mossmorran and Grangemouth without any say, and having projects like MachairWind imposed on us. Scotland is therefore simultaneously deindustrialised and inappropriately reindustrialised. This is about a fundamental lack of energy sovereignty.
Ecosystem Collapse and National Security
SUCH a development comes in the very same week as ITV published extracts of the report the government didn’t want you to see.
The contents were so shocking the Government tried to bury it.
In January, the government published a report – Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse And National Security – on the security and economic threats resulting from nature collapse. The findings were so dark that the Government tried to suppress it.
George Monbiot has written: “The most important document published by the UK Government since the General Election emerged last week only through a freedom of information request.
“The national security assessment on biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse was supposed to have been published in October 2025, but the apparatchiks in Downing Street sought to make it disappear.
“Apparently there were two reasons: because its conclusions were ‘too negative’, and because it would draw attention to the Government’s failure to act.”
“Its conclusions are devastating: ‘If current rates of biodiversity loss continue, every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse.’”
In any sane world, that would be front-page news everywhere and the moment for decisive, unprecedented action. Instead, we’ve been listening to nutters rave about efforts to green urban spaces, or swivel-eyed loons rant against net zero.
The report was compiled by the joint intelligence committee – which includes the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. This isn’t Friends Of The Earth.
Monbiot lays out some of the consequences revealed by the report: “It tells us that ‘ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair)’.
“This presents a threat to ‘UK national security and prosperity’. It says: ‘The world is already experiencing impacts including crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks. Threats will increase with degradation and intensify with collapse.’ The results will include geopolitical and economic instability, increased conflict and competition for resources.
“‘It is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food’.
“It also warns that ‘conflict and military escalation will become more likely, both within and between states, as groups compete for arable land and food and water resources’.”
You can read the full, accessible version of the assessment on the UK Government Publications site.
It’s in this context that we have to consider projects like the MachairWind farm. When is anyone going to wake up to the fact that the relentless assault on the natural world has consequences for us all? That endless rapacious extractivism is undermining everything?
Dysfunction and Cost
SO far, so grim.
We don’t need to produce more energy. We already generate the equivalent of 100% of electricity consumption from renewables. But we can’t distribute it. We already pay “constraint payments” to energy companies to not produce energy when the grid can’t handle it.
Now even energy companies are asking the same question: why are we building more wind farms?
Pete Miller from Octopus Energy has said: “It’s crazy to build wind farms where there’s no grid, then pay them to sit idle, and then pay the most expensive fossil fuel plants to generate the power instead.”
But that’s exactly what we currently do.
Simone Rossi from EDF Energy said: “We should stop building wind farms. As a country, we don’t need more electricity generation capacity. We need to use the generation capacity we’ve already got.”
To be 100% clear, I am 100% in favour of renewable energy, and have advocated for it for 30 years or so. But this is not about energy. It is about power.
Scotland is in the midst of an onshore renewable energy revolution. It’s a revolution that could produce clean energy, thousands of good jobs, a reliable source of income for rural communities, and conquer fuel poverty. But it does none of these things.
It is creating uproar and outrage by communities swamped by wind farm proposals and the accompanying infrastructure, and shocked by the industrialisation of the Highlands and Islands, with little benefit to see for it.
Many communities experience renewable energy as something done to them, rather than something for them or by them.
The energy system that the mass of renewable energy feeds into is a complete shambles. The renewable energy sector is huge and growing. According to Equitable Energy Research, the combined capacity of operational onshore and offshore wind projects in the Highlands and Islands is around 5GW. If all projects currently in the pipeline were to be built, the total capacity could exceed 25GW. But it is supplying energy to a supply system that can’t cope, hence the aforementioned “constraint payments”.
If you wanted a metaphor for everything that is wrong with Late Britain, here it is. Endemic fuel poverty sits alongside enormous corporate profit, while a moratorium on onshore wind in England, maintained by the Conservatives for 14 years, is in stark contrast to a gold rush for renewables in Scotland. We have a crisis of over-abundance of supply alongside people in the coldest parts of the UK unable to adequately heat their homes.
If we stand back from this crisis, we see that the problem is one of gigantism, an addiction to growth, and an inability to stand up to corporate power. The onshore renewables industry is vast – frequently foreign-owned – and far from the demand it is supposed to supply, leading to massive costs of distribution.
In a sense, the energy/democracy crisis is Scotland in microcosm.
Liberate Technology
SCOTLAND’S whole economy is dominated by models which are extractive, and a vision for an independent Scotland needs to be one which changes those models at a fundamental level.
The problem of being imprisoned within our current, failing mindsets is neither unique to energy nor confined to Scotland. We can easily look to other near neighbours for examples of better practice: to the Faroes, where fuel poverty is a thing of the past, or to Denmark across the North Sea where community-owned wind is at 52%. In Scotland, it is 0.2%.
The tragedy of living in an energy-abundant country, suffering endemic fuel poverty, while exporting vast amounts of energy for consumers hundreds of miles away is clear to everyone.
So what to do?
One idea is really to change the way we are viewing energy itself. The challenge is to imagine a different kind of energy system altogether based on addressing energy as a human need, not a commodity, and for the energy system to be decentralised and put in the hands of public ownership. This could take different forms: micro-renewables owned by community trusts and larger-scale projects owned by national bodies.
As it stands, the renewables revolution offers the opportunity to revitalise the Highlands and Islands and provide an income stream for sustainable housing and improved infrastructure. Instead, we are industrialising the Highlands for the benefit of private corporations.
We really need to explore what the new technologies can do for energy democracy and environmental justice. At the moment we have a singular model, not just of gigantism but of a National Grid which has never really been questioned.
“The Grid” stands like a figment of an Iain M Banks novel, a gigantic piece of technology that is woven into the fabric of everyone’s lives and is considered an unquestionable good whilst being unable to fulfil even its most basic purpose. Everything must be sacrificed on the altar of this entity: landscape, ecosystems, serenity, peatlands, birdlife and wildlife.
The Grid is a testament to centralised Britain, decaying and archaic but completely unquestioned. It is based on an outdated energy system that is no longer fit for purpose.
As Ben Cooke notes: “Britain’s grid was built to move energy from a few big power stations, running on coal, gas or nuclear, mostly near the middle of the country. But increasingly, we’re using it to carry energy from the windy peripheries of northern Scotland and the North Sea, and from solar farms all over the place.”
It’s becoming very clear that energy infrastructure, like political power, needs to be radically decentralised. The war on Ukraine tells us this; the Strait of Hormuz tells us this.
Energy, like democracy, needs to be locally owned and controlled, and we now have the technology to do this.
We need to somehow, urgently wake up to the realities of ecosystem collapse we’ve been warned about and change the way we run our economy.
The vast MachairWind project is just the latest disastrous development, but it must be a line in the sand. It would be monumental folly to let it go ahead.
