Green energy champion Dale Vince has described as “just silly” Donald Trump’s call to remove wind turbines from Scotland.
The owner of ethical power company Ecotricity says the transition to clean sources is making progress. Instead of calling for a halt to renewables the focus should be on getting prices down, he says.
Ahead of his visit to Scotland from Friday 25 to Tuesday 29 July, the US president has urged the UK to switch back to oil and gas and remove the turbines – which he calls windmills.
“They have so much oil there,” he said last week. “They should get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil. [Those] windmills are really detrimental to the beauty of Scotland and every other place they go up.”
Mr Trump is expected to meet Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney during his five-day trip, with energy and tariffs top of the agenda.
Commenting in an interview on Mr Trump’s calls for the green strategy to be halted, Mr Vince said: “He’s a silly man…the idea that they harm the landscape is not a new one, but it’s very much a minority view. Most people like to look at them in the landscape, and they are graceful moving structures.
“I don’t want to give an awful lot of air space to what Donald Trump thinks we should be doing in Scotland, I mean what’s it got to do with him?”
However, Mr Trump will receive some support from those who believe the UK is taking a huge gamble by hastening the demise of the oil and gas sector.
Even among those who accept the green transition, there are those saying the UK and Scottish governments must recognise the near and long term demand for oil and gas, and that it will continue to be a valued contributor to the Exchequer for decades if managed properly.
They say the net zero strategy is not moving fast enough to replace jobs and investment now being lost as a result of the energy profits levy and falling confidence among big oil companies.
Stuart Goodman, a retired consulting engineer, said: “Hopefully, Trump can persuade Starmer to continue to develop O&G as we all know they should. We are not in a place where we can abandon it.”
Mark Lappin, chairman of Deltic Energy, said: “Can we have wind turbines AS WELL AS oil and gas? the problem is one of tribalism. If you are for something, you have to be against other things. The future mix will require us to balance cost, reliability and emissions.”
Mr Vance, who also owns English football club Forest Green Rovers, hailed as the greenest club in Britain, has built Ecotricity into a £100 million company regarded as a rival to low-cost Octopus Energy.
He donated more than £5 million to the Labour Party and does not expect the UK government to be knocked off course from its 2030 transition target.
“You’ve got Reform and the Tories pouring into this anti-net zero space in a way they wouldn’t have done if Donald Trump wasn’t in the White House,” he said.
“He says these crazy things like we can’t afford net zero. What does that even mean? It’s basic climate denialism, it goes against science and logic and economics actually, because even if there wasn’t a climate crisis, renewables are the cheapest form of energy we can make.”
He said the UK had achieved 50% green electricity on the grid. Getting to 100% in the next five years “would be hard to do, but it’s not a ridiculous target,” he added.
He is campaigning to end the mechanism that links electricity prices to gas which is creating artificially higher prices for wind and solar power.
“It doesn’t make any sense to do that, and it would be a simple change to make,” he argues.
Gas switch warning
Meanwhile, the head of British Gas has warned that forcing households with gas boilers to pay higher green taxes than those with heat pumps would be an “abomination”.
In a stark warning to Energy and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, Chris O’Shea said that removing net zero levies from electricity bills would punish the poor and amount to a “terrible distortion of the market”.
It comes amid reports that Mr Miliband is considering stripping green levies from electricity in a bid to encourage the adoption of heat pumps.
Instead, the costs would be moved on to gas, making a boiler more expensive to run.
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