New Luce, Scotland wind farm and renewable energy
There's a post office in a very small village called New Luce, which is on the fringes of the Forest Of Galloway in South West Scotland. The village has around 50 houses, a church and this post office.
I was dumbstruck how a little community like New Luce could support the wages of a full time post master with a very small shop and post office counter. New Luce, as lovely as it is, has no mountains, named Lochs or tourist attractions, nothing of note other than the natural beauty of this Dark Sky Park in a forest. So how did the post office survive?
It turned out that the developer of one of the local wind farms pays a community levy, like a grant out of the profits (it's what renewable companies do) and this directly subsidises the staffing and business costs for the postmaster.
Renewable energy generation is not only cleaning up the grid and providing cheap, reliable energy but also supporting a local community which in turn gives further support to the whole community. After all, who doesn't like a natter when queuing at the post office?
It's the small interactions and conversations that keep our villages alive and as we all know, when a shop or post office closes, it can feel that a community has lost its soul. New Luce has a new heart and soul and it's wind powered! Here in Norfolk, solar farms of a certain size pay a community levy back to the Parish Councils. It could be for new play equipment improvements to the village hall or other projects that benefit the whole community. It's what renewable energy companies do.
Profits of dirty energy companies have also been a major talking point of late, what with the newest UK Government forcing us all to take out a loan through our bills to secure the profits of the energy giants who are making over £170 billion pounds in excess and unexpected profits partly due to the effects of the war in Eastern Europe. And with new licences being given out to extract more oil and gas by blowing up rocks beneath our very feet, we are being told that this will help with energy costs.
Thankfully, readers of The Lynn News are educated enough to understand that energy is priced globally and no matter what we do here, the cost of our energy will not be reduced by extracting more fossils and only by making wholesale changes to our energy market will we see the real price of energy.
About nine miles from New Luce, is the Airies Wind Farm. The road is steep, narrow and very bendy as you wind your way past ancient burial sites, stone circles and cairns on hilltops honouring long lost Scottish Kings, you start to see the wind turbines, gently rotating above the hills and out of sight again. This goes on for miles and miles. And amongst the beauty of the Forest of Galloway National Park, the bleak moorland, steep cliffs, lochs and burns that run into rapids with a surprising amount of water falls, the one thing that struck me more and more was the perfect, tarmacked roads.
Not a pothole, not a crack and all this on single track roads. The roads, it turns out, have been re-made, re-laid and re-surfaced by the wind farm companies who built the clean, green energy generators. Like I said, this is what good energy companies do, they support a community, they provide for a community, they can enhance a community for the benefit of all within a community.
Whereas continuing to use gas and oil to power our lives doesn't.
The former Shell employee and local MP Liz Truss who happens to be the Prime Minister at the moment, appears to be totally out of her depth and totally out of touch with the public's desire for a changed energy market.
Oh, before I forget, renewables produced the equivalent of 97.4% of Scotland's electricity consumption in 2020, mostly from wind by the way.
Kevin Holland
