Filed for The Guardian, 16 June 1992
When Sam Morshead looks out of his window these days he gets angry. For he believes that the beautiful valley that spreads before him - gentle slopes, green pastures, natural woodlands - is threatened with destruction.
“I have compared what they are proposing with someone drawing a thick black line across a valuable painting. It ruins it for ever. No-one wants to look at it,” he said. “It means the absolute devastation of a quiet rural community, the undoubted destruction of wildlife habitat and has horrifying implications for health.”
The newly-privatised electricity company, Scottish Power, is looking for ways of planting some of Britain’s biggest pylons through some of south west Scotland’s finest scenery. So worried is Sam Morshead, the clerk for three Scottish race courses, that he has become chairman of a local protest group, Stop The Overhead Pylons (STOP).
“Scottish Power is prepared to ride roughshod over the views of the people of Ayrshire in order to make massive profits for shareholders. This is not going to benefit Scotland at all, it is only for profit. Why should we suffer for the profits of a private company?” he asked.
The forthcoming clash in Ayrshire is just one of the increasing number of pylon wars that will have to be fought throughout Britain in the wake of the privatisation of the electricity industry. It is an intractable, inevitable consequence of supplanting public planning by private profit as the prime organisational motive of the electricity industry.
As the difficulties of controlling the development of private power stations become more obvious and the demands for transmission lines more frequent, local objectors and national environmentalists are moving beyond the immediate issues of visual amenity, wildlife and health, to a more fundamental question: are the pylons needed in the first place?
Over the next 15 years Scottish Power is hoping to earn up to £450 million from providing 20% of Northern Ireland’s electricity. Last year the company signed a £170 million agreement with the Northern Ireland Electricity company to connect the two countries by electric cable. The intention is to run a 35-mile line of 120-foot pylons down the south west coast of Scotland from Killoch, east of Ayr, to Ballantrae, north of Stranraer, then to lay a cable under the sea.
The precise route has not been decided, although nine different options are expected to emerge when Scottish Power publishes its consultation paper next month (July). They are almost certain to be opposed by local authorities which will oblige the Secretary of State for Scotland, Ian Lang, to call a public inquiry. Although some objectors argue for the pylons be put underground or for a longer sub-sea cable from Hunterston to the north, there are growing numbers who argue that Northern Ireland would do better to generate its own electricity.
One of the latter is the local Labour MP for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley, George Foulkes, a veteran critic of the electricity industry. He has accused Scottish Power of being “secretive and underhand” in the way in which it approached farmers along a proposed route. Pressing ahead despite strong local opposition was typical of “the arrogance of power companies,” he said.
For Scottish Power, which denies such accusations, the Northern Ireland link is a straightforward commercial deal that relieves Scotland of some of its embarrassing surplus capacity caused by the commissioning of the nuclear plant at Torness in East Lothian. The company has also hinted that it could help the prospects for Ayrshire coal by ensuring a market for Scotland’s coal-fired electricity.
Although the other ongoing pylon war in North Yorkshire may sound different, it is also at root about need. A public inquiry in Northallerton, which opened in May, is assessing the National Grid Company’s application to build 270 pylons across 46 miles of unspoilt countryside between Lackenby, on Teeside, and Shipton, near York.
They are to take power from a new 1,875 megawatt gas-fired power station at Wilton on Teeside being built by a consortium including ICI, an American power company called Enron and four regional electricity companies. Once such a power station is authorised, the National Grid Company has a statutory duty to connect it to the grid.
The Wilton plant is one of 27 new ‘combined cycle gas turbine’ stations that are planned for England and Wales by private companies trading on the cheapness of North Sea gas and its relatively clean environmental image. Many of them will require new or reinforced power lines, including 22 miles of overhead pylons on South Humberside and another five miles at Seabank in Avonmouth. But according to the National Grid Company’s own projections, they are going to lead to a ludicrous 57% electricity overcapacity by 1997-98.
The Council for the Protection of Rural England points out that the National Grid Company is now caught in a cleft stick. Since the location of new power stations is determined by market forces and the company has no choice but to connect them up, it has lost the ability to plan. It has, in other words, a strategic function without any strategic powers.
The whole process has fallen victim to the salami syndrome: the division of the whole into smaller constituent parts in order to render it more acceptable. Hence there was no environmental assessment of the impact of the power lines when the Wilton power station itself was considered. This is because the 1989 Electricity Act has effectively separated the consent procedures for power stations and transmission lines.
CPRE’s assistant secretary, William Sheate, in his evidence to the Northallerton inquiry yesterday (Thursday 18 June), argued that this separation represented a breach of the European Commission’s environmental assessment directive, which requires that all the direct and indirect effects of any project should be addressed. A formal complaint has already been sent to the Environment Commissioner, Carlo Ripa di Meana.
“The damaging environmental impact these lines will bring is a consequence, we believe, of the government having failed to establish procedures which implement the environmental assessment directive in full, thereby allowing consent for the power station to be granted without full consideration of all the environment implications of the proposal,” he said.