The new millers of Scotland

I was amazed by changes I encountered in Scotland since the mid-1990s.  Suddenly there are windmills on lots of hill tops and even in clusters off the coast.  The feature photograph is another ‘Intentional Camera Movement’ (ICM) image of the line-up of windmills just off Balmedie, 10 km north of Aberdeen. See yesterday’s post about my fun with ICM and brace yourself for a few more in the coming few weeks. I’ve included an ‘Extra photo’ of the windmills in the normal sharp mode for comparison.

Donald Trump Junior created his business folly nearby i.e. a golf course on the sand dune systems (actually on a site of ‘Special Scientific Interest’ which identified it as a priority for protection).  The story is told in a depressing film (2011) called “You’ve been Trumped”, which accurately characterised this obscene bully long before the world came to fear him.  But I digress from photography and am getting dangerously close to Blip’s exhortation to “Be excellent” … after all, half of USA voters chose him as their president in their 2016 election.

My Danish cousin’s husband is one of over 1000 shareholders that own windmills just across the water in northern Jutland. Their newest mill is giving a 40% per year ‘return on investment’, so it will be paid off in under 3 years!  Partly that’s a reflection of its newer design, but also the higher prices triggered by the energy crisis brought on by the Ukraine war.  Nevertheless, their older mills have returned on average a 14% per annum return on investment over the decades before … so they took about 7 years to pay off, and then had (or still have) at least another 13 years of efficient and renewable energy production ahead of them at minimal cost. The smart money is going into renewable energy and Denmark has been leading the way for two decades. By the look of it, Scotland is catching up. 

New Zealand faces a big choice – do we scatter smaller clusters of 3-5 windmills across the landscape, like those appearing in Denmark (see example in Extra Photos) and now spreading across Scotland?  Or do we concentrate the mills in ‘wind farms’ at a few key places.  I prefer the latter, even though I do find them graceful and even heroic. I would just prefer there to be some no-mill zones preserved for natural landscape horizons where our eye often travels, whether on not one is a photographer.