A couple of degrees of global warming doesn’t sound like all that much does it? But think how much you feel it when you have a temperature. Just before I was due to head off for a long-planned trip to do part of the Camino de Santiago in Spain last week, I fell ill. A cold turned into a chest infection. I sweated, I shivered. My equilibrium was all messed up. There wasn’t much I could do apart from lie on the sofa under a blanket and watch episodes of ‘Death in Paradise”. That’s pretty much what it’s like for the planet too.
Mostly, the earth has a balance. Carbon is absorbed, released, re-absorbed. Over time, some is crushed into fossil fuels, in a process that takes literally millions of years. But then humans decided to suck out this energy-dense substance and burn it very fast. The earth’s coping mechanisms are getting overloaded and starting to go haywire. Rain falls in the wrong place. Ice is melting. The sea is heating up. Before long, we may start to see a lot of death in paradise.
There are signs of hope - it could be that 2024 is the year of peak carbon production and emissions fall instead of rise after that. But we have to do more. There is still a huge amount of effort required to shift away from dependence on fossil fuels. Scotland is going to miss its climate targets - what more can we do here?
One of the easiest ways to shift the balance is with more onshore wind. Onshore wind is easy to install and relatively cheap to maintain. The tech has been around long enough that we know how it works - and it delivers a lot of bang per buck. Just a couple of turns of the blades on a turbine creates enough power for one house for one day. Scotland has lots of windy hillsides that are absolutely perfect for this.
But there are a couple of blockers. The first is resistance from people and charities who think that the land - which is largely a man-made wilderness that was cleared for sheep and shooting doesn’t ‘feel’ wild if you can see wind turbines. The second is that we desperately need more transmission lines to take the power from the wind turbines to where it is needed, and there is also a lot of opposition to these.
Spanish lessons
Fortunately, I recovered quite quickly from my illness and was able to go on the Camino after all. It was interesting to see the extent to which Spain has embraced onshore wind. I met up with an old friend in the cathedral town of Burgos and we made our way across a portion of the mesata, the high plain, where famously the rain mainly falls.
There had indeed been some recent showers and there were puddles on the track, which rises and falls gently through the miles of wheat fields. The portion of the route we had chosen runs across the province of Castile y Leon: dark green fields, trees full of singing birds, patches of wildflowers, interspersed with thinly-populated medieval villages. The revival of the pilgrimage is bringing some life back - the murmured greeting ‘buen camino’ sounded perhaps once an hour as others overtook us. A couple of times, we crossed paths with a family of nine beautifully-dressed French children in stripey tops and - I kid you not - one was wearing a beret.
It was a beautiful, peaceful scene, mostly drenched in sunshine. When you walk, the horizon changes slowly and you have time to notice your surroundings. One constant feature is the stands of wind turbines on every hilltop. Like the windmills Don Quixote mistook for giants, they insouciantly twirl their lances as they await all comers.
What is not so obvious, unless you look for them, are the electricity pylons which carry power away from the turbines to the national grid. These are much smaller, and darker in colour so they don’t stand out as much against the sward.
Drove roads of electrons
Can Scotland learn from Spain on this? Many Scots question why our country produces so much renewable power already, and yet we still pay some of the highest energy prices in the world. They feel Scotland is being exploited and don’t want transmission lines. I saw a spoof on social media that made me laugh, purporting to come from a 17th-century Highlander complaining about his view being spoilt by lines of cattle endlessly being driven past his house en route to England, with no benefit to him. The power lines are sort of drove roads of electrons, I guess, and they won’t leave much more of a mark on the landscape, when we find other ways to move power, as we probably will. In the meantime, seeing them on the horizon seems a small price to pay for doing our bit to save the planet.
Energy has certainly been mismanaged in the past - for instance, the UK’s national electricity grid was privatised under Margaret Thatcher and starved of investment for decades. But regardless of the politics, we need these turbines and transmission lines. They can help shift the whole UK onto a renewable-based grid. The climate emergency is the biggest challenge we face and we must tackle it together, working with every other country on the planet, starting with England.
Made the investment, had the solar panels installed on the roof, sufficient generation and storage to run a heat pump if viable (...it's not, not yet anyway...), now we don't draw much from the grid and draw nothing from March to October...
It is highly suspicious that electricity costs have risen in Scotland in spite of the 'free' generation available there, but such is neo-liberalism. Though I think a lot has to do with the incompetancy, niavety, and ignorance (in the true sense of the words) of our political and business leaders.