Communities across the Highlands are responding to a rallying call to ‘just say no’ to SSEN and their horrific proposals for the region.
After years of being targeted by multinational wind developers they have had enough.
Communities B4 Power Companies has officially asked SSEN to provide evidence of need for these transmission lines and infrastructure.
Simply saying ‘because we say you do’ is not going to cut it anymore.
We want facts, figures and to see an overarching plan for the Highlands, Scotland and the UK because we don’t think the dots are being joined up.
‘All about money’
The Scottish Government’s own figures show that Scotland has enough wind power in the system to meet targets and double what OFGEM say will be needed by the winter of 2042.
Consumers are already heavily burdened on their energy bills by constraints (currently £1.4bn) that are paid to wind operators to switch off.
These transmission lines will serve even more turbines and will create an even bigger bottleneck as England doesn’t have enough infrastructure to take it and will not for a decade.
This is all about money. It’s about SSEN increasing their shareholders’ investment by choosing the cheapest and most destructive environment-busting ‘solution’ they could possibly have come up with.
Communities want answers not mealy-mouthed platitudes. We are not stupid. SSEN need to give us data that we can have analysed by independent experts.
In FMQs on April 20 2023 the first minister said: ‘This government will not steamroll, will not impose on ANY community a policy they are vehemently opposed to’.
We will hold him to that.
Ministers talk about ‘just transition’. We are demanding ‘just transmission’.
Communities have spent years fire fighting individual industrial developments in an attempt to protect the Highlands from greedy speculators.
We are now fighting the big one and we are ready to do so.
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