Scotland’s green-obsessed left-separatist government has been left with egg on its face by revelations that dozens of gigantic onshore wind turbines are having to be hooked up to diesel generators, leaking thousands of litres of hydraulic oil into the countryside.
Scottish Power — led by a Spaniard, Ignacio Galan, and actually a subsidiary of Spanish firm Iberdrola — conceded that some 71 of its turbines had to be hooked up to diesel generators to keep them warm in December, according to the Sunday Mail, with a whistleblower telling the left-leaning newspaper that problems with the turbines are deep-seated.
“During December 60 turbines at Arecleoch and 11 at Glenn App were de-energised due to a cabling fault… In order to get these turbines re-energised diesel generators were running for upwards of six hours a day,” they revealed.
“Turbines are regularly offline due to faults where they are taking energy from the grid rather than producing it, and also left operating on half power for long periods due to parts which haven’t been replaced,” they continued.
“Dirty hydraulic oil is also regularly being sprayed out across the Scottish countryside due to cracks in mechanisms. Safety standards have not improved since a worker was killed in 2017 at Kilgallioch wind farm.”
Indeed, the Record went on to say that some 4,000 litres (over 1,000 U.S. gallons) of leaking hydraulic oil was “sprayed over the countryside” by the turbines — a less than environmentally-friendly impact.
“The Scottish Government wants to make our country attractive to foreign investors as 40 per cent of the wind that blows across Europe blows across Scotland. However, that should not mean we put up with our waterways and nature being polluted with carbon from diesel generators and hydraulic oil,” the whistleblower complained to the Mail, evidently a true believer in the climate change agenda.
“People should be aware that, while their energy costs continue to rise, our windfarms are not operating as efficiently as they could be due to corporate greed,” they added — possibly a reference to things like the reported £11 million Scottish Power’s Spanish chairman raked in in 2021, as regular Scots were being crushed beneath sharply rising energy bills.
Indeed, Richard Tice, the leader of the Reform Party — formerly the Brexit Party — recently complained that some 83 per cent of Britain’s offshore wind turbines are foreign-owned, with the largest single owner being the government of EU-members-state Denmark.
“We British taxpayers are paying huge inflation-linked subsidies to create ever larger profits for the Danish taxpayer. What’s the advantage of that?” Tice demanded.
Colin Smyth, a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the leftist Scottish Labour Party in the region, conceded that “having to use diesel generators to de-ice faulty turbines is environmental madness,” attacking Scotland’s devolved government — also led by two other leftist parties, namely the separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) in coalition with the Scottish Greens — for the fact that their “rhetoric on net zero is very different from the reality” and accusing them of “dishonesty”.
However, the Labour Party is itself far from free of wind-related fiascos in Wales, where it runs the devolved government, with a 300-foot behemoth of a wind turbine costing millions of pounds toppling over in the country last year and terrifying local villagers, for instance — apparently due to high winds.
Wind turbines having issues with wind — the resource they are supposed to be able to tap for renewable energy — was far from unheard of prior to this, with other Welsh turbines lighting up like “giant Catherine wheels” after gales caused them to burst into flames in a 2014 incident, for example.
