The Cabrach and Glenfiddich Estates cover almost 50,000 scenic acres of Morayshire at the north-eastern end of the Grampian Mountains.
Owned by Christopher Moran, a colourful Tory donor who made his fortune in the City of London, they take in grouse moors, a salmon river, a pheasant shoot and some of the finest stalking ground in all of Scotland.
There are also some 18 tenanted farms, endless estate cottages, and a grand 17-bedroom lodge, which once belonged to the Dukes of Richmond and Gordon and boasts a ping-pong room decorated with oil paintings by Thomas Gainsborough.
Moran, who is 77, acquired this pile via two transactions, in 1979 and 1982.
A keen shot, he describes his hobbies in Who’s Who as ‘architecture, opera, art, politics and country pursuits’, and once told an interviewer that Cabrach and Glenfiddich gave him ‘sanity’, saying: ‘In London I can work 24 hours a day. But here, I unwind.’
Lately, the wealthy laird’s perks have been more than just sporting. For recent events have turned his picturesque Highland seat into one of rural Britain’s most prolific cash machines.
Historically, this was one of the finest unspoiled views in Scotland. But today, the skyline is broken by 59 gargantuan steel turbines of the Dorenell Wind Farm.
Each of them stands 126 metres tall and sits on land that has been leased by Moran to the French energy giant EDF.
The Cabrach and Glenfiddich Estates are owned by Christopher Moran, a colourful Tory donor who made his fortune in the City of London. Pictured: Dr. Christopher Moran congratulates Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla on their Coronation
The skyline at the Dorenell Windfarm (pictured) in Scotland is these days broken by 59 gargantuan steel turbines
There is something that makes Dorenell not just remarkable, but very newsworthy. And it involves the thorny topic of money
They were installed in 2019, and – assuming the wind is blowing – can feed 177 megawatts of clean, green electricity (enough to power 106,000 homes) into Britain’s National Grid.
Given the stunning location, its construction was highly controversial. Locals filed around 600 complaints, saying it would despoil the landscape, hurt tourism and provide little tangible economic benefit.
EDF argued it would play an essential role in helping Britain meet ‘net zero’ targets. In an effort to silence critics, they offered to set up a ‘Community Benefit Fund’ that would distribute some of the profits to charities that help residents.
Although an initial planning application was opposed by Moray Council, development was approved on appeal by the Scottish government.
That, broadly, is the history of the place. And there’s nothing so very unusual about it. Thanks to our deepening political love affair with wind turbines – Energy Secretary Ed Miliband recently unveiled plans to double our onshore wind capacity by 2030 – similar schemes are being rolled out, against local opposition, across the land.
Yet there is something that makes Dorenell not just remarkable, but very newsworthy indeed. And it involves the thorny topic of money.
First, though, a brief lesson in wind farm economics. In common with all British facilities, Dorenell generates insufficient power to make back the cost of its construction by simply selling electricity on the open market.
What few bill-payers properly understand is where the mountain of cash they shell out each month is ending up. Pictured: View of a wind farm used to produce electricity
Instead, its owners receive generous subsidies, paid for by consumers via levies on energy bills, which are supposed to help them to turn a small profit.
Supporting the UK’s wind, solar and other renewable power in this manner costs the grand total of £25billion a year, according to the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) charity.
That’s more than £850 for every household and equates to around 40 per cent of the electricity costs you are currently paying every month.
So far, so eco-friendly. But what few bill-payers properly understand is where the mountain of cash they shell out each month is ending up.
For while Mr Miliband’s subsidy system is supposed to help developers wash their face, it’s increasingly enriching a class of ‘wind farm vultures’, who are exploiting the rules to cream off profits at the British public’s expense.
Energy firms have for years kept bill-payers in the dark about this mounting scandal, filing accounts that (perhaps deliberately) keep the finances of individual projects opaque, and hiding behind NDAs and other confidentiality agreements to conceal how much cash is being diverted to already wealthy landowners via lease payments.
All of which leads us back to Dorenell. Because its finances were last week laid bare, in scandalous detail, during a remarkable case at the Court of Session in Edinburgh. The proceedings, which revolved around a contractual dispute, provided an insight into what is going on under the bonnet of Britain’s cash-soaked wind farm industry.
While Ed Miliband’s (pictured) subsidy system is supposed to help developers wash their face, it’s increasingly enriching a class of ‘wind farm vultures’
Take the question of profits. At one point, it emerged that Dorenell Windfarm Limited, the company that operates the whole thing, now makes almost as much money (in some years a whacking £40million) from switching its turbines off as it does from generating green energy.
Later, it became clear that the firm makes millions more during these periods of downtime, via a loophole in the subsidy system that allows it to ‘trade’ the electricity it’s not actually producing – more on which later.
Take also the question of cash that Christopher Moran, who is already worth £658million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, is creaming off from all this. Court papers revealed that he’s being paid in the region of £10million a year in rent by Dorenall.
That’s the equivalent of around £170,000 per turbine, per year. What’s more, it’s ten times more than locals were led to believe he’d earn from the scheme.
To quote one disgruntled campaigner, it makes the £2million funnelled to the ‘Community Benefit Fund’ since 2020 to compensate locals for despoiling their landscape ‘look like chicken feed’.
Some of the other dizzying numbers cited in the litigation show how the ‘green’ subsidy regime every Briton is financing has created a perverse property bubble.
In effect, Christopher Moran’s remote hilltops, which have for centuries only been useful for farming sheep and shooting, have been turned into some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the country.
Some dizzying numbers have shown how the ‘green’ subsidy regime every Briton is financing has created a perverse property bubble (file image)
Details of how the public’s cash is splurged have been laid bare in an by Lord Sandison, one of Scotland’s most senior judges, on July 10 (file image)
‘People sometimes wonder why a landowner would want to host a wind farm. The answer, as this court case shows, is they are being offered rents that would tempt a saint,’ is how Dr John Constable, director of the REF charity, puts it.
‘As a result, the green subsidies that make these high returns possible are now at an unsustainable level.’
Constable points out that what happens at Dorenell is likely to be happening across Britain. For this particular wind farm accounts for little more than 1 per cent of the UK’s entire onshore capacity.
Details of how the public’s cash is being splurged are laid bare in an ‘opinion’ on the litigation that was published by Lord Sandison, one of Scotland’s most senior judges, on July 10.
It reveals that Moran’s company Glenfiddich Wind Limited, which runs his estate’s wind farming operations, is suing EDF’s operating firm Dorenell Windfarm Limited for ‘sums allegedly underpaid’ under the terms of its lease.
The claim covers a three-year period from 2022 to 2024. During that time, the contract between the two stipulated that Moran’s firm would be paid either a ‘gross income rent’ based on a proportion of revenues generated by the turbines, or a ‘minimum annual rent’ of £6million, depending on which was higher.
In 2022, he received £8,496,981. The following year, the figure was £9,480,725, and in 2024 it reached £10,406,641.
Upwards of £300million a year is now being spent under a ‘constraint’ scheme – designed to compensate wind farms – which has now cost bill-payers the grand total of £1.8billion (file image)
To put things another way, Moran made more than £28million by doing very little aside from owning a remote bit of moorland.
But at some point, he decided the figure was around £6,196,518 less than it ought to have been under the terms of the contract, and took EDF to court.
At the heart of the dispute is an argument over so-called ‘constraint payments’. This term describes cash that is paid to wind farms to compensate them for either switching off their turbines, or reducing capacity, when the grid has become too full to take on more electricity.
The system is designed to cope with power surges during times of high wind speeds. Initially, it was rarely used.
In 2010, the first year of its existence, ‘constraint’ fees cost consumers £174,000. But as more wind farms have been built in remote areas bottlenecks in the grid have become more commonplace.
As a result, upwards of £300million a year is now being spent under the ‘constraint’ scheme, which has now cost bill-payers the grand total of £1.8billion, according to the REF.
What’s more, critics believe wind farm operators can sometimes make more, under the rules, by switching off their turbines than from making electricity.
This has created a perverse incentive to build new facilities in isolated regions such as Moray, where the strained infrastructure means ‘constraint payments’ are likely to be more common.
Christopher Moran took the EDF to court when he realised money he had made from his venture was less than it should have been (file image)
Dorenell is a case in point. For according to court papers, in 2023 it received £37million in ‘constraint payments’, equating to half its gross income of £74million. The following year, the figure was £40million.
These sums were then included in figures used to calculate Moran’s rent– but Dorenell Windfarm Limited was also making extra cash from shutting down its turbines by exploiting a loophole in the subsidy system via which farms receiving ‘constraint payments’ are provided with ‘credited energy’ they can then sell on the open market.
A highly-complex trading arrangement then allowed them to make millions in extra profits by selling the ‘credited energy’ that they’d never actually generated when prices were high.
Moran thought that a portion of this extra income ought to have then found its way into his rent payments.
EDF disagreed, sparking a contract dispute. In his opinion Lord Sandison appears to have largely sided with Moran, and both sides in the dispute are now considering their next steps.
‘The exposure of such scale of financial returns and infighting, all whilst this wind farm development has one of the most derisory community benefit packages in the country, should be subject to the highest level of scrutiny by the Scottish government,’ is how Jonathan Christie, the Chief Executive of The Cabrach Trust, a local charity dedicated to regeneration, puts it.
Colin Mackenzie, a whisky historian who has holiday lets near the Cabrach and Glenfiddich Estates, describes the roll out of wind turbines across the Highlands as a ‘national scandal’ saying: ‘The figures in the court case are astonishing and make the £2million awarded to local projects since the Community Benefit Fund opened look like chicken feed.’
Moran isn’t the only one to have smelled a rat about Dorenell’s ‘constraint payments’. Last year, Ofgem forced the operator to pay £5million into a ‘redress fund’ after finding that it had charged ‘excessive’ amounts to switch off turbines under the scheme.
To critics, the grubby affair only serves to highlight how energy subsidies represent one of the most regressive wealth transfers in history, funnelling cash from poor people to some of the wealthiest in society.
Christopher Moran is perhaps the very last person who might be in need of extra cash. A grammar schoolboy from a modest background, he joined Lloyd’s of London in the 1960s as a 17-year-old insurance broker’s assistant and within five years had acquired his first million.
By the 1990s he had a car collection that extended to three Rolls-Royces and a Lagonda, plus one of largest homes in London: Crosby Hall, a medieval pile in Chelsea that was once home to King Richard III.
There was also a beauty queen wife, named Helen, with whom he had two sons before divorcing in the late 1990s, a vast collection of antiques and Old Master paintings, and a contacts book that would see him host everyone from Tony Blair, Boris Johnson and David Cameron, to Prince Harry, Queen Elizabeth, and an array of celebrities at his palatial residence next to the Thames.
Life has not been without the occasional scandal. His City career suffered a setback in 1982 when he became the first Lloyd’s broker to be expelled in 300 years for ‘discreditable conduct’.
A few years later, he was censured by the Stock Exchange Council and fined $2million in the US for alleged insider dealing.
And in the 2000s, Moran was reported to be one of several individuals the Tories had returned donations to so as to prevent their identities from becoming public under new disclosure rules.
In 2018, a newspaper probe found that one of his properties, a serviced apartment block named Chelsea Cloisters, was home to more than 100 prostitutes, earning the building the nickname ‘ten floors of whores’ (Moran denied having any knowledge of their presence).
And in 2023, it emerged that he’d fathered a daughter named Iva via his girlfriend Emily Rae.
Not that Moran is running away from controversy. To the horror of locals, he’s announced plans to build 22 new wind turbines on his estate via a joint venture with a Canadian company.
Given recent revelations at the Court of Sessions, we can assume they will earn lots of money from being switched off.
And so the Laird of Cabrach and Glenfiddich will get even richer, Scotland’s Highlands will become less beautiful, and you and I will be forced to pay for it.
