Plans for a massive £5.4 billion offshore wind farm, which could have seen the siting of several hundred turbines off the coast of Tiree powering one million Scottish homes, have been abandoned by the developers.
Hard volcanic rock in the seabed, the strength of wave action which could impede construction and the significant presence of basking sharks are the main reasons for the decision.
Announcing its decision, ScottishPower Renewables (SPR) said the Argyll Array project was currently not financially viable in the short term.
The project may become viable, however, as offshore wind technology develops, the company said, but it estimates it will not be in the next decade.
Campaign group No Tiree Array (NTA), formed in 2010 to resist the development, welcomed the news. "Had the Tiree [Argyll] Array been developed it would have been an environmental disaster for Tiree and the west coast of Scotland," it said in a statement.
But some Tiree residents had seen it as a way of tackling depopulation with new business opportunities and jobs on an island that has lost 15% of its population in the last 10 years.
SPR insists it never said how many turbines would be needed, only the capacity of up to 180MW. It was widely calculated it would be 300 turbines. There were even predictions of 500.
Jonathan Cole, SPR's head of offshore wind, said: "As cost reductions continue to filter through the offshore wind industry, and as construction techniques and turbine technology continues to improve, we believe that the Argyll Array could become a viable project in the long term."
One of the developers' problems was the results of a basking shark tagging project launched by Scottish Natural Heritage. It found higher numbers than expected, which also surprisingly displayed courtship-like behaviour such as jumping the water, parallel swimming or nose-to-tail swimming.
SPR, owned by Spain's Iberdrola, follows RWE and Centrica, which have cancelled a project each, saying they were uneconomic because existing technology was not advanced enough.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article