It’s Clean Air Day – the UK’s largest air pollution campaign designed to improve public awareness of air pollution and explain how we can tackle the problem by helping to protect our health, and the environment.
With that in mind, we recently sat down with Todd Westbrook, author of Revolution – the first book to provide a short, sharp history of Scottish wind power – to discuss the history of Scotland’s relationship with renewables and the change that he’d like to see in the coming years.
I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about Revolution, in your own words.
Revolution is an accessible, positive history of the Scottish wind sector which ostensibly starts in the mid-‘90s and runs through to the modern day. It’s designed to be readable; it’s not overly scientific, it’s not overly technical. It’s a human story about why wind energy matters, and about what wind energy can teach us as we gear up for the next stage of our low-carbon challenge as a country, and as a society.
You’ve been involved with researching renewable energy for 20 years, and I was wondering when your interest began, and what drew you to the subject?
I’ve been a working journalist my entire life, and I came to wind by accident. Someone I worked with invited me to do one day a week as a stringer working for a renewable energy publication, and it grew from there. This happened to be in the early 2000s when Scotland’s renewables journey was beginning to take off, so my engagement with the subject grew along with the industry. The timing was just lucky, I guess. I was able to document it as it went from a movement to an industry, because it was just a crazy dream for many people. It was, as I say in the book, sandal-wearing, bearded academics, hippies and failed middle management, and they joined forces to turn the dream into the reality that’s around us now.
When wind turbines were first implemented, they were quite controversial. Do you feel like the same concerns people had then still exist today, or do you feel people are more informed?
There are two strands to this: one, when wind power first arrived, it was something different and people don’t like things that are different. They don’t like the idea of something new on their landscape, something new on the horizon, particularly if they don’t understand what it’s trying to achieve. Over time, of course, that happens less and less, as people learn to live with it and learn more about what’s going on.
I think there is now an acceptance of the need for wind power. Climate science and climate politics were pretty low down on the agenda when the wind revolution first kicked off. I don’t think you could say that anymore. I think the climate emergency is top of everyone’s list. And wind power can play a huge part in addressing those issues, but I think it’s necessary to learn your history before you make the decision about what comes next.
You have years of experience researching and writing about renewable energy. How long had you had been thinking about writing Revolution before you began the process?
I decided to make a change in my career, to leave day-to-day journalism behind and concentrate on writing longer works. The book was not on my list of things to do, but when I quit my previous job, I was looking for some kind of perspective. I’d spent a lot of time and energy covering this phenomenon of wind and because I did it in a day-to-day, granular way, I didn’t get a chance to get a long-term perspective. I didn’t get a chance to take a step back to look at what I was doing and why I was doing it, and I think the book answered those questions for me. It allowed me to explore what I’d been doing and why I’d been doing it, and why it was important. So, in some ways, I suppose you could say the book was a very inexpensive form of therapy. And it worked. I feel much better now.
What made you feel like last year was the right time to release Revolution?
Two things: the timing was great because last year, 2020, was the 25th anniversary of wind power in Scotland. In other words, as of last year, Scotland was 25 years old in terms of the installation of commercial wind power, so that’s quite a milestone. It seemed to be wildly ignored and unmarked, except for my book, so I’m pretty proud about that.
Other than that, I needed the time and scope to have discussions with the people that were necessary to get the book out. The original generation of people who were instrumental in the wind revolution are at a point in their careers, and in their lives, when they’re also having the chance to reflect. So, in some ways, it was just luck that, as these people were thinking about the history, I was trying to understand it a little better than I previously had. These two things happened to coincide with the 25 year anniversary – I think we call that serendipity.
What would you say is the most important thing that people don’t know about wind power?
Scotland is the most successful wind power country in the world. If you take the amount of wind installed in Scotland, and you divide it by the number of people in the country, Scotland has more wind per capita than any other country that I can find.
Do you feel that Revolution is a good gateway book into other books on renewable energy, specifically wind power?
Yes! It provides you with a good grounding in terms of wind power, but it also looks at other questions to do with renewables and the climate crisis in general. So, it’s a good way to take a different look at the entire subject of climate science and renewable energy, and to have a different way of thinking about the challenges in front of us. It can be quite overwhelming, the climate emergency, but if you look at the story of Scottish wind – that it went from zero to enough power to light every light in Scotland within 25 years – it can make you hopeful going forward that that same degree of accomplishment can be made between now and our deadline of 2045.
Where would like to see the state of wind power in, say, five years time?
I’d like to see wind deployed as part of a wider roadmap that includes some of the other challenges that we face as a society: heating, transport, interconnection and networks. These things need to be thought of in a holistic way. I think wind has, for too long, been considered – well, it has been – an easy win. You can beat targets and create green electricity with wind power, but that allows you, in some ways, to ignore some of the other stuff. And it’s not wind’s job to do the other stuff; it’s society’s job to make sure we don’t ignore the other stuff. So wind is important, but it needs to be important as part of a bigger picture of change. If you leave wind to concentrate on wind, that’s exactly what it will do. But that can’t be the only thing we look at.
How can readers discover more about you and your work? I know that you have a website.
I do have a website! People are more than welcome to come and check it out.
Is there anything else you’d like to talk about that we haven’t discussed?
I think the most important thing about the book for me, as the writer, is that it is designed to be easy. Not only is it full of information, but it’s also full of information that is easily digestible. Just because it’s quite a heavy subject, it doesn’t mean it should be difficult, and I think too many authors make that mistake. If it’s not readable, no one’s going to read it. So I was very keen to make it a very readable, and very accessible work, because that’s my job.
Where can I buy the book?
You can get the book on the Luath website, and most online retailers. I would encourage people to go to their local bookstore as well, because that’s a fine place to pick it up!