The was a hoolie blowing through the highlands last week.

The Community Council Renewable Convention, a collective meeting held in Inverness last week, brought together 53 community councils across the region to discuss their concerns over the impact of renewable energy developments.

Hell hath no fury like a scorned community council and rightly so. Pulling together a meeting that represents over 80,000 residents is no mean feat. Logistically impressive but, more to the point, very politically astute. The outcome was a document – a declaration of Inverness, if you will – signed by local and national politicians to back “urgent debates” over the speed, scale and outcomes of renewable projects within the area.

The Convention touched on people’s real anger and feeling of being completely scunnered with renewable projects popping up over their region and there being no immediate community benefit. They are, of course, correct.

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In our submission to the Scottish Government’s consultation Offshore Wind Policy Statement, the STUC has made clear that communities up and down the land are being short-changed and given the short shrift by multinational corporations who reap the profits of the resources communities provide them.

Further to the point, it's also not the “just transition” Scotland was promised. It’s a system where our natural resources generate massive wealth for private companies, with a trickle of jobs and community benefit in return and even then, those jobs are laced with precarity and insecure conditions.

For example, developers are meant to provide Community Benefit Funds, with the Scottish Government recommending a baseline of £5,000 per megawatt. But in practice, many projects fall short and these funds pale in........

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