Wind farms provoke negative reactions from two overlapping groups of people: those who believe the farms are ugly, and those who believe they do not make economic sense.

The second lot will be asking themselves some serious questions this weekend with the news that Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE) is to splash out more than £1bn for Irish wind farm group Airtricity.

SSE chief executive Iain Marchant is a canny type and not given to dishing out cash on big vanity projects. So the assumption has to be that wind farm economics stack up.

The deal will make SSE the UK's biggest windfarm operator and give it a route into European markets and, inevitably, China.

It will pit SSE directly against Iberdrola, the Spanish energy group which last year swallowed up SSE's rival, ScottishPower, which is a global leader in renewable power.

If wind farms do not make economic sense, then a multibillion-pound international delusion has taken hold.

That just leaves the first group of objectors, those who think wind farms don't fit in with the scenery.

Their fears of a landscape covered in whirring turbines are made worse by the fact that applications are dealt with one by one, with no apparent strategic direction from Holyrood.

A better idea would be to establish national no-wind farm zones in large scenic areas, for example the Highlands north of the Great Glen.

Applications for farms outside the scenic areas could then be fast-tracked without doing serious damage to Scotland's image.