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July 25, 2023
Information is power
Skye is world renowned for its outstanding natural beauty but many islanders believe that is being threatened by a rash of proposals for new wind farms across the island. The two existing wind farms are due to be repowered with pylons twice their current height and there’s a sense that the community are missing out on opportunities – both to extract more community benefit and to have more say over what comes next. As a first step, and on the basis that information is power, Skye Wind has been launched. This could be a template for communities elsewhere.
The landscape and environment as we currently know it on Skye looks set to change forever with the advent of industrial scale wind farms in the next 5-7 years. To date, there have been consultation events held on the island by the commercial wind development companies to provide some information on these developments, but it is difficult for islanders to find information to help them understand the bigger picture and the implications for the future of the Isle of Skye.
This website has been designed to act as a centralised information point for islanders to obtain information on the bigger picture containing some background information and also links to other sources of data.
A good starting point for anyone looking to understand the scale of the proposals is to view the Highland Council wind turbine map which will allow you to scroll across to the Isle of Skye and zoom in on the particular wind turbine developments proposed:
In summary, there are two existing projects on Skye in the Edinbane area which are being ‘repowered’ which essentially means replacing smaller 100m high turbines with significantly larger 200m high turbines which will enable a greater amount of power to be generated by each turbine (approximately increasing from 2.3MW per turbine to around 4.5-5MW per turbine)