Image: Vattenfall (Creative Commons)
In Energy Voice yesterday:
‘A new mammoth offshore wind project has applied for Marine Scotland consent off the north-east coast of Scotland. A joint partnership between SSE and Fluor, Seagreen Wind Energy will develop two large scale offshore projects named Seagreen Alpha Offshore Wind Farm (OWF) and Seagreen Bravo OWF. The combined 120 turbine development will look to generate a capacity of over 1 gigawatt (GW), making it the largest energy generating windfarm in Scotland to date.’
As always, this comes in the wake (I checked. It applies to air flow too) of many other reports on Scotland’s booming wind-power sector:
Sorted! Enough wind power for 87% of Scottish homes in August
First subsidy-free onshore wind farm for Scotland?
Nearly 100 Scottish contracts awarded by Swedish wind-farm owners
Scotland’s offshore wind electricity generation capacity could be five times greater by 2030
Talking-up Scotland 
This morning, instead of tuning in to GMS to get the weather, I tuned to Radio4Extra, which had a programme marking 50 years of Tomorrow’s World. One of the presenters mentioned Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and used these catastrophes to indicate how much we were the victims of propaganda regarding the efficacy of nuclear energy – ‘it will be so cheap probably there will be no charge for it’, Since the presenters were selected because they did NOT have a science background, essentially they were delivering propaganda. To his credit, the presenter recognised this and commented rather sourly on the mendacity. It is easy to be contemptuous about ‘the benefit of hindsight’, but, it seemed clear to me that the presenter had experienced an epiphany.
Nuclear Energy always had two principal aims – a military one and ‘to secure energy supplies”. In the case of the latter by ‘securing’ they meant principally against the trade unions such as the NUM (where are they now? ), the various rail unions and the engineers. Other forms of energy production were already well-known. Hydro was quite well developed and for centuries, wind and water had powered mills and so could be adapted to produce electricity. There were theoretical ideas about solar, wave and tidal power and things like heat pumps had been in operation. So, there were sources of local supply and no need to import energy and ‘be at the mercy of foreigners’.
It was the naked self-interest of the military and the desire for some politicians to wave their willies and of the oil and gas companies, which stalled the development of modern technologies that could use renewable sources.
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The more extraneous intermittent renewable power we produce, the the closer we will be to a hydrogen( unless batteries can store huge amounts of energy) economy.
This should be run by the State Scottish, I hope), to democratise energy, an essential part of civilised life.
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