Euan Mearns | Energy Matters
The Scottish Government recently launched a consultation on a revised energy strategy. The existing policy is to produce the equivalent of 100% of our electricity from renewable sources by 2020. The new policy is to produce the equivalent of 50% of all energy consumed from renewable sources by 2030 – in 13 years time. Electricity currently represents 22% of energy consumption and we are now at 59% renewables, suggesting that 13% of all energy currently comes from renewable sources. The new plan calls for renewable output to increase approximately 4 fold. It is also planned that our two nuclear power stations will close in this time frame.
Space heating currently consumes 53% of energy and is predominantly provided by natural gas. The new plan calls for hydrogen derived from natural gas combined with CCS to sequester the CO2. Scotland is to become world leader in the hydrogen economy. I suspect we will find ourselves leading a group of 1 country that may quickly go to the wall should these proposals be implemented.
[Image is Whitelee wind farm just south of Glasgow is the UK’s largest onshore wind farm. 215 turbines have a combined capacity of 539 MW.]
The consultation report – Scottish Energy Strategy: The future of energy in Scotland – is drenched in the language of fake Green science. But the report does contain an informative chapter on the current Scottish energy system that is to be the focus of this post. I have used 10 of the 13 diagrams from this chapter of the report but have provided my own narrative on what the data actually shows and the diagrams are not posted in order. This is the first of a number of posts on this subject where I hope to engage with well-informed and interested parties across Scotland.
ECO-ENERGY DATABASE 