Meeting of the Parliament 10 February 2026 [Draft]
If there is an email address, that is fantastic, but the letter that we were sent by Ivan McKee is quite clear: objections have to be made by filling in a web form or sending them in by post.
We have to make it easy for people to lodge an objection, but it seems that everything that the ECU has done over the past month has been an attempt to make it harder for people. I think that that is an outrage to democracy.
The Government has been trying to shut up rural communities, because it does not want to listen. We know that the recent proposals for the Tealing to Kintore and Peterhead to Beauly power lines generated more than 10,000 objections—most of them by email, I would think. The Government wants to shut up those communities and railroad all that infrastructure through.
There is a reason for that. We currently have 4.5GW of operational capacity in offshore wind, but the Government’s target is to increase that to 11GW by 2030, and then to a staggering 40GW by 2040. If you think that there are a lot of substations and battery storage, you ain’t seen nothing yet, because things will get a lot worse in order to support that intermittent energy source.
Let us burst the cheap energy bubble right now: offshore wind is not cheap. The amount of floating offshore wind that is planned is horrendously expensive, and when we add to that the storage, network and stability costs, we can see why our bills are going through the roof.
How good it would be if the Government had an energy strategy so that we could actually see what it was trying to do. I suspect, however, that we do not have an energy strategy because the Government does not want us to see what it wants to do. It does not want to show people how much more of that infrastructure they will have to put up with, and it does not want workers in the oil and gas industry to know that it does not want to see the industry continue.
Communities in North East Scotland are fed up with being ignored. They have had enough—they are fed up with being the ones who suffer in our headlong dash for net zero without any view to the real-life consequences of energy transmission projects. Most of all, those communities are fed up with being ignored by the out-of-touch, out-of-sight, out-of-ideas SNP Government. Communities such as Kintore, Tealing, the Mearns, Peterhead and New Deer are all fed up. The Government should stop shutting them down, stop building monster pylons in our back gardens, stop being cloth-eared, and start listening to the communities throughout Scotland that are saying no to monster pylons.