the great renewables ripoff

Tue, Feb 9, 2010

As global warming continues apace, with most of the country snow bound yet the Cairngorm summit station registering 18degC (ok, it’s bust just now!), the Man From The Scottish Parliament, he say yes to the controversial Beauly to Denny power line. Instead of drovers taking cattle from the highland hills to the lowland markets, smash and grab merchants will be digging up the landscape to export it south in the form of power no-one can afford to pay for. Hence the huge subsidies available to the renewables crowd. This is in support of the Scottish National Party’s blinkered aim of destroying our wild land heritage to allow Scotland to “fulfil our potential to be the Saudi Arabia of off shore renewable energy”. Oh for the Saudi Arabian weather!

The SNP have the admirable aim of generating a full half of Scotland’s power requirements from renewable energy resources by 2020, which apparently is 8GW (8,000 megawatts) hence they are minded to allow anyone with enough cash to install a wind farm. But hold on there. According to the latest Scottish Natural Heritage magazine (PDF article here), the SNP estimate offshore sources total 21.5GW. Almost three times the 2020 requirement. So why have onshore wind farms at all? According to those figures, offshore can supply 100% demand with a third left over. Why have massive towers carrying cables through our diminishing wild landscapes when the vast majority of renewable energy comes from the sea, a reliable source of tidal movement and generally energy rich movements? When was the last time you didn’t see the Moon rise and drag the world’s oceans through a turbine? How many times have you driven past a wind farm on a windy day and most of them were not turning?

Why have the Beauly Denny line at all when everything’s at sea and can be hooked up with an undersea cable? It’s all becoming a bit embarrassing, as the SNP know they’ll have to buy in power from abroad, as onshore renewables can’t deliver and they refuse to build new nuclear capacity thanks to their pact with the Greens. However, the UK government is taking a dim view of this while others warn the SNP they need new capacity that isn’t a slave to the fickle Scottish weather. So the SNP plan to buy from abroad, where nuclear is used to generate the electricity. Sounds a bit two faced to me. They won’t generate it here but they’re happy to buy it from someone else who will generate it for them. Using technology they themselves spurn. Thanks to their minority government they’ve had to team up with the Greens and sensible futures for power generation in Scotland have fallen foul of ecomentalist zealots and caught in the middle of this politcal mess is our wild land.

At some point there will have to be a tradeoff between saving the planet and the quality of life available on it. We can have the sensible option of offshore + nuclear, or we can have the Green option of no wild land left, just a new Caledonian Forest of turbines.

The nuclear option is beholden to the old adage of “Never crap on your own doorstep”. Problem is, as you bed down in the wilds, lying in your tent door supping a cuppa and watching the sun go down, that huge glowing orb on the horizon is probably not what you think it is. It’s a huge Green SNP bahooky with a load of renewable shit headed your way.