The Mountaineering Council of Scotland (MCofS) is the representative body for hillwalkers, climbers and off-piste skiers and receives core grant funding from sportscotland in recognition of this status. We are a membership organisation with over 2,000 individual members plus 139 affiliated clubs that contain over 7,000 members. Our committee structure is entirely voluntary and appointments are the result of a democratic process. The professional staff complement is made up of four posts at our Perth office.

The MCofS welcomes the opportunity to respond to this consultation, which is of great significance to the landscape of Scotland's mountains and therefore people's enjoyment of them. We offer our response to this consultation, as we did to earlier consultations on transmission lines, and request that we be kept informed and involved in the ongoing consultative process.

As we stated in our previous responses to the consultations into the proposed Beauly to Denny transmission line, we do not believe there is sufficient justification for such a major investment in infrastructure when there are so many uncertainties and absence of overall strategy. The justification seems to be based on short term thinking, but the consequences of the proposals would be permanent damage to some of Scotland's finest landscapes.

There are strong objections to the proposed Lewis wind factories, and it is far from certain that they will be developed in their current proposed form, yet the rush to consult on proposals for the associated transmission lines is racing away as if there is no time to spare. The official deadline for this particular consultation has been impossible for our organisation to meet, and whilst we request that you take account of our late submission, we would have expected a two to three month period for a consultation of this importance.

The MCofS has a number of serious concerns about all of the routes proposed in this consultation. We believe all of the proposed routes would have significant impacts on wild land that is valued as a recreational resource. We therefore believe that the future of energy transmission lies more in undersea cabling than overland transmission through remote and wild areas of Scotland.

We do not accept the assumption that power generated to the west of Scotland must be fed into the national grid at Beauly or Fort Augustus and carried on cables running down the centre of the country.

The level of investment in transmission infrastructure will be proportional to the amount of power produced off Scotland's west coast. It is perhaps a sign of how small the current Lewis onshore wind proposals are that SHETL are considering the shortest and cheapest means of transmission to the grid. With the longer term potential to generate massive amounts of energy from the North Atlantic waters around the Western Isles it appears ridiculous to be rushing to build controversial onshore wind factories on Lewis, and damaging Scotland's finest landscapes, when you could be making plans to transport considerably larger amounts of energy direct to the centres of population in the north of England in twenty or thirty years time.

The initial priority for renewable energy development in the Western Isles should be for the islands to become self-sufficient by producing their own heat and electricity. This should be achieved before any energy is exported to the mainland.

Given the current rush to consult on transmission route options and to gain consents for controversial onshore wind proposals, we believe that the likelihood of the current plans changing before any construction takes place is very high. There should be less haste and more strategic thought. If this exercise is rushed through and poor decisions taken then the consequences will be monumental. It is in the vested interests of certain businesses that this is got wrong, that poor decisions are taken in haste and that our landscapes be destroyed. There are plenty of people asking for a more sensible considered debate, but sadly the emphasis appears to be on rushing into a set of hasty and costly decisions.

19 November 2004

Details of the proposals, including maps, are available on the Scottish and Southern Energy website.    (use the Site Map to navigate their site)