The Sunday Times recently published a serious of articles on "Why WindFarms should be blown away".

In the articles Jonathan Leake and John Elliott explain just how much money WindFarm developers stand to make and how:

"The government has put in place a complex system of payments that stands to make developers very rich. A single two-megawatt turbine can generate its owner nearly 385,000 a year for 20 years.

It is, however, where that money comes from that is most interesting. In a typical case only ?120,000 would be payment for the electricity generated. The remaining ?265,000 - the real profit - comes from the sale of bits of paper called Renewable Obligations Certificates (ROCs).

A wind farmer is allowed to create one ROC for every 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity he generates - and a two-megawatt turbine will generate about 5,300 of them a year. The wind farmers are able to sell these certificates to the big electricity suppliers, who need them to prove to the government that some of their electricity comes from renewable sources".

Rotor blades bigger than a person

The turbine rotors for the proposed WindFarm on Stallashaw Moss will be 90m (295ft) in diameter.

The majority of rotor blades are made of glass reinforced plastic or wood epoxy but can be of aluminium or steel.
  
Wind turbines can be affected by bad weather risking damage to the turbines themselves and other surrounding property.

The Scottish Executive's Planning Advice Note on renewable energy (PAN 45: Renewable Energy Technologies), states:

"The possibility of attracting lightning strikes applies to all tall structures".
  

Angus MacDonald is a Friend of Stallashaw Moss!

Angus MacDonald, Chief Executive of the "Financial News" and a respected Scottish business leader, has written to 'The Friends of Stallashaw Moss' with a message of support and details of his own experience of dealing with WindFarms.

From Angus MacDonald
Blair Atholl

"I set up the anti-WindFarm fighting fund three months ago having learnt about the issues surrounding WindFarms in the spring of this year. This was after we had heard about plans to erect a WindFarm above our house near Blair Atholl in Perthshire. Until then, there were merely hundreds of groups of anxious agitators in each area where WindFarms had been proposed but with nobody getting the negative aspects across to the press and the Scottish Executive. This is our role.

How it affects those of you who live within sight of WindFarms is clear. Tourism can suffer, resulting in less spending in local shops and businesses; house prices may fall; electricity prices could rise - turbines generate electricity for a small percentage of the time and are extremely expensive to build.

You could well be living in a house with a lower value, paying a lot more to heat it. Local shops, B&B's and other businesses may close and the view around your home could be ruined.

The need to inform people of these problems, particularly parliamentary & council representatives, as well as the press is crucial."

Click here to read Perry Gourleys article, "MacDonald does battle with windfarms" recently published in the "Scotland on Sunday" (18th July 2004).

Castaway 2000 Star is a Friend of Stallashaw Moss

  Julia Corrigan, who starred in the BBC's reality TV show Castaway 2000 along side characters like Ben Fogle, has written to The Friends of Stallashaw Moss with a message of support,

"Although I am very much in favour of generating electricity through renewable means, including wind power, I am opposed to the idea of locating such a large WindFarm so close to a primary school and to the homes of the people who live in and around Auchengray. To do so would suggest a lack of forethought to this proposal.

Scotland has a beautiful heritage of unspoilt wilderness areas just like our island home of Taransay back in the Year 2000. There are vast areas of Britain in serious need of redevelopment and these would be better considered before rural communities such as Auchengray.

The Friends of Stallashaw Moss have my support in protecting their environment and their community".
  
Its better to save electricity than to keep generating more of it!
Did you know that a reduction of 180,000 tonnes of CO2 by Britains WindFarms, which sounds impressive, adds up to less than 0.1% of all UK emissions!

If every household in Britain were to change just ONE conventional light bulb for an energy efficient one, then we would save an estimated 1.5 MILLION tonnes of CO2 per year!

Do you ever leave your television on 'standby' overnight or while you are out? More than 70% of the CO2 produced as a result of running your television set, is generated while you aren't even watching it! Switch it OFF!

How often do you leave your mobile phone or other charging unit plugged in to an electric socket even although you arent charging anything? If everyone in the UK were to simply unplug unused chargers we wouldnt need to keep building more power stations!