Environmental campaigners have urged Donald Trump to stop trying to thwart Scotland’s search for green energy after an appeal court threw out the US billionaire’s latest bid to block a major offshore windfarm.
Three senior judges in Edinburgh ruled that Trump had no grounds for accusing Scottish ministers of illegally agreeing to license an experimental 100MW offshore wind farm only a few miles from his Aberdeenshire golf resort project.
Trump also accused former first minister Alex Salmond – originally a powerful ally for the New York-based property developer - of being biased in favour of the project and skewing the approval process. The court said his allegations were wholly unfounded.
Lang Banks, the director of WWF Scotland, said the appeal court’s ruling was welcome news for anyone interested in cutting carbon emissions; Trump had already lost earlier attempts to block a major onshore windfarm on Shetland, the Viking project.
“Once again the courts have seen through Trump’s flimsy, misguided attempts to frustrate Scotland’s ambition to create clean power and green jobs. It’s now time for Mr Trump to stop wasting any more time and money on this case,” Banks said.
Patrick Harvie, the co-leader of the Scottish Green party, added: “This spurious legal action has gone on too long already, and we cannot allow Trump’s inflated ego to delay our renewables industry a moment longer.”
The Trump Organisation, which has already pledged to spend millions of pounds blocking wind energy, said it planned to lodge further appeals, by attempting to win permission to appeal to the UK supreme court in London and eventually to a European court if necessary.
In a statement, Trump’s company said: “Today’s written judgment is no surprise – it’s impossible to have a fair hearing challenging windfarm applications in Scotland. We have already instructed our legal team to commence an appeal before both the supreme court of the UK and the European courts.
“The EOWDC proposal has now languished in the planning system for more than 10 years and has a long way to go before construction can actually commence. Despite today’s ruling, with no available money and the current political movement to end windfarm subsidies, it’s impossible to envision how this ill-conceived proposal will ever get built.”
A vociferous critic of windfarms, Trump has waged a vigorous campaign against the project to install 11 offshore wind turbines of different types in a test site off Aberdeen known as the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre, ever since launching his resort proposals eight years ago.
Trump described the EOWDC scheme as “monstrous” when he appeared before a Scottish parliament tourism committee hearing in April 2012, and pledged to fund the anti-windfarm movement, as demonstrators protested outside the building.
His opposition to the scheme pitted him against many of the most vocal supporters of his £750m project to build two championship golf courses and a golf resort on a rare and protected coastal dunes system at Menie, north of Aberdeen.
The EOWDC project is backed by local councils who supported the golf resort, businesspeople such as Sir Ian Wood, whose firm Wood Group is an EOWDC partner, Robert Gordon university, which awarded Trump an honorary degree, the European commission and the Scottish government.
Trump’s first bid to block the scheme failed last year, after a judge insisted there was no evidence of any illegal bias by ministers. Lord Docherty ruled that the approval process had been legal and robust, even though ministers decided not to hold a full planning inquiry.
In throwing out the latest appeal, Lord Gill, the lord president of the court of session – Scotland’s civil court – said Trump had complained he had had to “run the gauntlet of the planning system” to get his golf resort approved, yet the windfarm passed without a public inquiry.
“That raises no question of law,” Lord Gill stated. “This was separate and a self-contained decision for the minister. It was for the minister to decide in the context of his policy priorities what weight to give to an objection based on the amenity of users of the petitioners’ golf resort who were more than 3km away and on the apprehended financial consequences of that for the petitioners.”
Ruling on Trump’s allegations there were a “multiplicity of allegedly suspicious considerations” that proved the Scottish government was biased, Gill said: “None of the considerations founded on by the petitioners comes anywhere near to supporting the petitioners’ suspicions. I fail to see how the aggregation of them makes its case any stronger.”
After having to appeal against planning refusal for an onshore grid connection station, the EOWDC has been stalled by problems for its lead company, Vattenfall, raising enough capital to start construction, despite securing €40m funding from the European commission.
The failure of Trump’s appeal may help persuade new investors to support the scheme, indicated Andy Paine, project director for the EOWDC and head of offshore wind development in the UK at Vattenfall. “We are obviously pleased that the Scottish courts have yet again supported the EOWDC, a much-needed investment in Scotland’s and the north-east’s energy infrastructure,” he said.
“The project partners continue to engage with the investor community and advance the scheme. The dialogue is encouraging, at times detailed, and we’re ready to start talks when we get through the legal process.”
