Chamber and committees

Elaine Nisbet submission of 5 June 2021

PE1864/E - Increase the ability of communities to influence planning decisions for onshore windfarms

I strongly agree with this petition.

I live in Shetland where a large wind farm, currently being built on deep peat is destroying the environment and tearing our community apart.

Thousands of people including myself have objected to this windfarm but we feel that we were not listened to nor able to have accessed sufficient professional help to have engaged in the planning process would have helped. And despite the despair that this one wind farm has caused, many more are planned because the Scottish Government wants us to become an energy island.

Some of the turbines will be very near houses, which is alarming given the fact no health impact study has been done but no one listens. There is no regard for the effect these have on our long-term traditional industries or how our small island can cope with the massive changes that will be needed to accommodate the wind farms.

If we had the same protection that England has I feel we would be better able to vocalise our concerns. I have already given feedback on the draft of the National Planning Framework 4 which I believe is a shoddy, disagreeable, contradictory piece of work.

I believe that wind farms, here at least, are breaking apart our community, not making them more resilient.

The Scottish Government is in my view ignorant of the value of what it sees as vacant/derelict land and has targeted them for wind farms, but if they properly consulted the community they would learn what they will lose by filling them full of concrete and steel and cables for evermore, slowly polluting our water supplies. Who will want to enjoy walking in nature when surrounded by 103, 155-metre-high turbines, emitting over 100 tons of epoxy microplastics and nano plastics and Bisphenol A pollution, which will potentially be a far bigger environmental and health disaster than climate change.

Restricting peat extraction is a poor joke, the same JCB driver who is digging up the peat for the wind farm is being paid to restore peat – thousands are being spent needlessly.

Electric vehicles – no one talks about the cost to the environment of making them just as no one talks of the cost to the environment of building a wind farm on a small fairly inaccessible island with limited existing infrastructure.

I fear that without support for this petition our quality of life and health will suffer even more than it already does.

I believe that the Committee should empower communities to represent themselves so that they are effectively and meaningfully able to influence planning decisions regarding onshore wind farms.