Assault By Battery
Ground has yet to be broken on the holiday development but in March 2024 Beaufort Highland Lodges, which is 75% under Dame Gloag's control and represents the holiday park now, wrote to The Highland Council planners saying it had 'great interest in fully understanding the potential of impacts that the BESS may have on our plans/site'. Its representative, whose name is redacted, added that they were seeking a meeting with Field Beauly, the developers, 'to learn more about the BESS... until we have had that meeting we are unable to comment either positively or negatively on the BESS proposal/ application'. A somewhat equivocal response you might think to such a blatant threat to the park's amenity.
In November 2024, Lovat Estates objected to a separate planning proposal for 36 batteries at Caulternich, close to the current cluster of 'green' energy applications, on grounds that it breached 'Highland Council policy designed to protect our neighbourhood, landscape and residential amenity'. With extraordinary largesse, Lovat Estates offered an alternative brownfield site on its own land which was duly granted by a compliant Highland Council in February this year. The Field Beauly connection to the existing Balblair substation requires SSE, which has granted the company a grid connection, to run an underground cable two kilometres over Lovat ground and presumably under the River Beauly.
The deadline for public comments was 16th March and at the time of writing there is no sign of an objection to the Field Beauly proposal from Lovat Estates even though the threat to 'neighbourhood, landscape and residential amenity' is far greater than the Caulternich proposal to which they objected. Neither The Highland Council nor the Scottish Government's Energy Consents Unit (ECU) seem to have registered an objection from Beaufort Highland Lodges either. The ECU says it is up to date in logging in responses.
Just as the nearby proposed Fanellan substation only covers 60 acres of the the 800 that make up its entire site, the 100 MW Dunballoch proposed site boundaries are enormous compared with the size of the initial site. Clearly both these projects are giving themselves room to grow. What would merely look like appalling industrial blots on the landscape now could resemble Armageddon in a few years time as the anticipated three more power lines come into Beauly and the sites expand.
Field Beauly is the spawn of Amit Gudka. Anyone following the fortunes of Bulb Energy, an electricity provider, will be aware that the lights went out in Mr Gudka's former business in 2021 leaving 1.4 million customers in the dark and an approximate £4 billion debt. Being the dealmaker he clearly is, Mr Gudka managed to extract billions from the British government for a rescue, having cashed out his shares for £4m in 2018. The bail out was estimated to add £150 to consumers' annual bills. Perhaps everyone deserves a second chance but would you want Mr Gudka in charge of a lithium time bomb upstream of a village of 1400 people and three SSSIs including a Ramsar (wetland of international importance) and Important Bird Area?
Meanwhile, building costs have risen considerably since 2021 when planning was granted for the Gloag lodges and the regulatory burden on running holiday lets and associated costs have increased a lot. Has Beaufort Highland Lodges given up on its development in favour of a no objection deal with Field Beauly? Has Lovat Estates conveniently forgotten its amenity concerns and agreed to allow access through its land to the Balblair substation? Is it constrained by its Fanellan and other SSEN commitments not to object to this one? Or are both objections mysteriously sitting in a siding, waiting to be logged into the ECU site well after the deadline? No doubt we shall find out in time just how clean the 'clean energy' in Lovat's Aird is.
