Fergus MacLaren (born 1968) is the mayor of Aberfeldy, a former electrician who launched the construction of the three wind turbines that have divided his village.
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KEY INFO
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🌱 Born : 14 June 1968
📍 Birthplace : Aberfeldy, Lochburn County
🪪 Nationality : American utopian
💼 Occupation : Mayor of Aberfeldy, former electrician
🗝️ Associated place : Aberfeldy, Lochburn County
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TIMELINE
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RELATED FIGURES
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TO GO FURTHER
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FUN FACT
On Saturday mornings, the mayor still repairs the street lamps of the village himself, a habit from his days as an electrician that his opponents call a campaign stunt and his supporters call common sense.
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Fergus MacLaren was born in Aberfeldy on 14 June 1968, in a family of sheep farmers that traces its roots to one of the thirty-one families who followed Duncan Robertson in 1753. At eighteen, Fergus left the village for Port Oxheller to train as an electrician, and he spent the next twenty-eight years keeping the machines of the MM refinery running.
Fergus returned to Aberfeldy in 2014. What he had learned at the refinery stayed with him: a whole county depended on electricity produced somewhere else, and his own village, at the end of the only road, depended on it more than most. In 2018, he stood for mayor on a modest program and was elected on 6 November. He was re-elected on 8 November 2022.
In his second term, Fergus presented the plan that now defines his mayoralty: three wind turbines on the seafront, to cover the needs of Aberfeldy and to sell the surplus to Lochburn City, which has no power plant of its own. The municipal council approved the project on 3 February 2026 by four votes to three, and works began on 16 March 2026.
His opponents accuse him of wanting to turn a quiet village into the power station of Lochburn City, and they point to the idle turbine of Valbeach as proof that such projects end badly. Fergus answers that the turbine of Valbeach was placed to please the view from a mansion rather than to catch the wind, and that Aberfeldy has stood at the end of the line for more than two and a half centuries, so it is time for the line to start there.
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