Windfarms are here to stay and more are coming, Dumfries and Galloway MP John Cooper warned this week.
But the Conservative politician is backing the idea of more community benefits from the renewables industry.
Mr Cooper spoke in a debate in Westminster which considered upping the amount of community benefit for places affected by renewables and associated pylons.
He added: “I feel the battle to stop wind farms has been long lost, though we must fight a rearguard action against ever-bigger turbines – giants of over 650 feet from base to rotor tip are the fashion – ever closer to our towns and villages.
“This will be a last-ditch fight. With Labour in power and happy to slyly rebrand the English Greenbelt the ‘greybelt’ to bulldoze through renewables infrastructure, the Scottish Government in Edinburgh is not taking enough notice of local feeling.
“They will trample local opposition to wind farms, and I fear will also turn a deaf ear to pleas to force power cables underground.”
The Westminster debate looked at upping renewables compensation, making it in law, and channelling the money through local authorities to the affected wards.
“It’s a long way from becoming law,” said Mr Cooper. “The interaction between Westminster and Holyrood is crucial and complex, but if we are to have windfarms, then the time seems right to look at what compensation communities might expect.”
He told the debate: “Wha but lo’e the bonnie hills…the very first line of the song Bonnie Gallowa’ extols the virtues of the rolling uplands of the south west of Scotland.
“Yet the tranquillity of the moors, farms and forests has been disturbed this last few years by the relentless march of wind turbines.
“And now Dumfries and Galloway is festooned with them.”
As of July, Dumfries and Galloway had 16 onshore windfarms, representing five percent of Scotland’s total.
They comprised 306 individual turbines, the fifth highest in Scotland, and neighbouring Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale had the most, with 540.
He told MPs and ministers: “Whether we welcome wind farms or have them foisted upon us, we must wrest what we can by way of community benefit from them.
“Communities already see little enough of the supply chain benefits. It is to be hoped that the previous UK Government’s efforts to create freeports might see more of the manufacturing based here in
Britain.
“I have hopes too that Labour will make good on a Northern Ireland Enhanced Investment Zone.
“As mapped out by the previous Conservative government, it included the western end of Dumfries and Galloway.
“We have the chance to reap a positive harvest from a whirlwind of change for the people living in the shadow of giant turbines and pylons. Let’s seize that chance.”