BUSINESS LUNCH

Athole Murray Fleming meets Dr. Keith MacLean

Dr Keith MacLean

Power for the people

Possibly the biggest issue facing all of us is the need for sources of renewable, affordable and environmentally friendly energy. There is a huge debate going on in both the corridors of power and the public domain on our options utilising available technology. Here, in Perthshire, there has been much concern about wind power, the visual impact of wind farms, never mind the actual benefits or otherwise. With these thoughts in mind I felt it was time to meet someone knowledgeable about these issues. Dr. Keith MacLean is Head of Sustainable Development for Scottish and Southern Energy. He is a member of the Executive of the Micropower Council as well as Director on the Boards of the Scottish Renewables Forum and the British Wind Energy Association. This year he took over as Chairman of the UK Business Council for Sustainable Energy.

Keith and I, with my scribe, met at the Red House Hotel in Coupar Angus where owner Alan Bannerman has been steadily building a good reputation for excellent, locally-sourced food.

The menus choice is wide-ranging and I was happy to note this included a children's menu - something sadly lacking in so many hotel restaurants.

We selected our starters and main courses - for Keith a melon boat followed by a Beef Stir-fry with noodles. I chose grilled haggis followed by a chicken curry and my scribe ordered mushrooms in a garlic sauce and then baked salmon fillet with cream sauce. The wine, which Alan had selected for us from his classic - and very moderately priced - wine list was a Katherine Hills Shiraz Cabernet from South Australia.

Our starters arrived very quickly and just as I had asked Keith to tell me something of his personal background.

I had most of my schooling and early university education in Edinburgh. After I graduated in chemistry I went on to do a sort of split PhD, doing the middle year in Hamburg. It was a good experience. I learned a second language and afterwards I went back to Germany to work with a chemical company. There I met my wife Andrea and we married a couple of years later. Two of our children were born in Germany. Our third was born just after we came back to Britain to live in 1990.

After 4 years working in contract research I moved to Hydro Electric. It was a time of development and change when they were moving, post-privatisation, into the world of commercial realism. I was given the task of taking forward their telecom activities, particularly taking telecom to remoter communities using the existing electricity infrastructure to do this.

Then came the merger with Southern Electricity. After some further time in telecoms, I became involved in looking into business development and at sustainability with all the implications for employment, and community interests taken into consideration. Initially, our primary business was mostly UK based. Now even though the activities remain in the UK, plans are being increasingly driven by European business and regulatory developments and I am becoming more and more involved in liaising with my counterparts throughout Europe.

In all this do you get any time for relaxation, for family life?

We all enjoy skiing. I play tennis and badminton and I sing with Perth Choral. Andrea works as an advisor with the Citizen's Advice Bureau. One of the family is at university, one is working hard in the hotel industry, and one is still at school.

At this point our plates were cleared. The melon was praised for its freshness and flavour. My haggis - which I learned had come from Stewart Reid the Butcher in Burrelton who supplies all the hotel's meat - was truly excellent, and my scribe had particularly liked the sauce for the mushrooms.

With our main courses served I asked Keith about wind power. People in Perthshire are seriously worried about the visual impact of wind turbines in this tourist area, and about how little actual power they supply.

In terms of contribution to overall power from wind sources, Perthshire's contribution could be very significant. The target for Scotland is to have 40% of its power from renewable sources by 2020 - that's a higher proportion than is being looked for from the rest of the UK. It has been gauged that 25% of Europe's wind power is in Scotland. I would be strange not to look at that as a potential source.

For many years people thought of natural gas as the way forward. With this winter's massive increases in price and when Russia cut off the supply to Ukraine, suddenly there were doubts about the security of the supply. Then, of course, there is the potential vulnerability from terrorist activity. The beauty of wind, wave, and tidal power is that these can all be indigenously sourced.

Perhaps people are not considering the long-term effects. They just don't like the idea of the hillsides with wind turbines.

I agree. It's an emotive issue. But think about it, there are no examples around for people to see and to judge by. Having lived in Northern Europe and seen a great number of wind farms in action there and in Denmark, there the overall reaction is positive. There has been no change in tourist numbers, and no continuing major adverse issues. There has always been fear of the unknown; nimbyism has applied down the centuries. People protested against the building of railways, new roads, hydro-electric dams.

So do you see any way through this?

Some of the strongest lobbyists against wind power now see it's not a bad thing. Where wind farms are established in places like East Lothian, for instance, there is a higher level of acceptance of them than where there are none. There was an incredible outcry against the building of the hydro electric dams. Nowadays people admire these man-made lochs as something beautiful and definitely part of the countryside.

Think about salmon farms, as another example. Nothing good was to be heard about them, and now they are regarded as a normal part of the economic activity of where they have been established.

At least with wind farms I suppose they can be removed when some better technology turns up.

Climate change is a global issue - and that's the biggest threat to tourism and recreation. It is difficult for people to think about the global situation. But we should be setting examples to developing giants such as China and India. We should be leading by example.

On the home front, the existing power stations, including the nuclear ones, are coming to the end of their lives. We need to concentrate on local power generation.

France has recently announced plans to extend their nuclear power dependence. I have to say that personally I am very much against nuclear power development - can mankind be trusted with an energy source that has such "Armageddon" side-effects?

We can't overlook the potential of nuclear power. The main problem is that its earliest major use was to create weaponry - and fast - and that led to the creation of a great deal of waste.

It's the waste storage and disposal that worries people.

Given today's technological developments and greater understanding of the waste problem I can assure you this would not become a greater issue in future. We are struggling to find ways to reduce carbon emissions and yet people are still looking to gas and coal rather than to nuclear power. We have to learn to differentiate between the acute fear of nuclear power and the longer-term effects of continuing to be dependent on finite fuels. Radiation is the worry, and yet there's a lot of natural radiation around that people accept. There's a large amount of radiation emanates from coal bings, for instance, and people who live in granite-rich areas like Aberdeen and Cornwall are subject to radiation.