THE Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is coming under increasing pressure to abandon its action in the UK Supreme Court against the decision of the Scottish Government to allow four wind farms to be constructed in the Firths of Forth and Tay.
The National can reveal for the first time the scale of potential losses to the Scottish taxpayer should the RSPB win its case. Over a 25-year period, more than £200m could be lost for projects that the Scottish Government wants to develop.
That’s because the wind farms are on the sea bed within the 12 mile territorial limit around the coast, and are therefore owned by the Crown Estate which, since April, has been under the control of Scottish ministers and whose profits are for use in Scotland. Perhaps embarrassingly for the RSPB, its Patron is Her Majesty the Queen whose Sovereign Grant is paid for by the Crown Estate in England and Wales.
The four wind farms will have an installed capacity of up to 2.3 gigawatts of electricity, enough energy to power a city the size of Edinburgh. If the wind farms do not proceed, the lease from the Crown Estate will simply cease with no income at all. The Crown Estate has confirmed the revenue figures: “For that type of project, we would anticipate an income of around £4.3m per year for each 1000MW (one gigawatt) of installed capacity (based on expected 2020 power values).”
That would mean more than £200m of revenue over the expected 25-year life of the wind farms.
The wind farm currently at the centre of the court case is the Neart na Gaoithe (NnG) farm in the Firth of Forth.
It already has a Contract for Difference agreement with the UK Government which would mean it could start construction next year with a generating capacity of 430 megawatts.
The Scottish Government granted planning consent for NnG and the other three wind farms — Inch Cape and Seagreen Alpha and Bravo — but the RSPB won an initial case applying for judicial review of the decision.
After further court hearings ended in defeat for the RSPB in Scotland’s highest civil court, the charity announced on Tuesday that they would be taking the case to the Supreme Court asking for permission to appeal against the Scottish Court’s decision. Nor would RSPB sources rule out an appeal to the European Court of Justice should the Supreme Court rule against it.
The National can reveal that the RSPB is concerned about the way in which the Scottish Government’s decision was reached as it would effectively be a green light for other developments in bird-sensitive sites. The charity say that thousands of gannets, kittiwakes and puffins will be killed near world-leading breeding grounds if the four wind farms, and particularly NnG, are built.
The developers and their suppliers yesterday launched a coalition to protest against the RSPB’s action. They say NnG alone represents an investment of £2 billion, is forecast to create 500 direct jobs during construction and a further 100 direct, permanent jobs once built, and that the number of turbines has been reduced by 60 per cent from the original plan.
Alan Duncan of Scotia Supply Chain, and a spokesperson for the NnG Offshore Wind Farm Coalition, said: “We have come together to call on RSPB Scotland to recognise the serious social, economic and environmental consequences of ignoring the advice of the Inner House of Scotland’s Court of Session and continuing to appeal this decision.
“Hundreds of families in communities across the east of Scotland will be directly affected should this project not go ahead. Highly skilled jobs, vital apprenticeships and the socio-economic benefits of this project are all at risk for the hard-pressed communities within the region.”
“While we are sympathetic to the concerns of the RSPB about the planning process, this is about real people, real jobs and real environmental benefit.”
The RSPB, which strongly supports renewables elsewhere, would add nothing further to its initial statement in which Anne McCall, director of RSPB Scotland, said “we felt we had no choice but to apply to the Supreme Court.”
Neither side would comment on the implications of the fact that Her Majesty is patron of the RSPB.
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