Scotland’s “Energy Strategy and Just Transition plan” is a disaster in the making.
From The State of Britain by Richard Lyon Substack
SUPPOSE THAT SCOTLAND’S CO2 emissions fell tomorrow to zero i.e. that, at midnight, the country ceased to exist. Then according to the “Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change” (MAGICC), based on the latest IPCC climate models, the reduction in the Earth’s temperature in 2100 would be undetectable.1
Motivated by the moral necessity and urgency of this achievement, the Scottish Government is proposing a novel energy policy—its “Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan”.2
This newsletter reviews its major themes and their implications, and considers briefly the probability of success of the Scottish Government implementing it.
In 2022, due to an insufficient quantity of wind and sun, Scotland’s current collection of wind and solar energy scavenging devices failed to generate about 70% of their nameplate capacity.3
Recent exhaustive statistical and econometric analysis of wind generation in Scotland by Edinburgh University shows that it is uneconomic, and destined for taxpayer bailout.4
Under the Scottish Government’s novel energy strategy, wind and solar energy scavenging devices are to be greatly expanded.
Hydrogen, an energy carrier that squanders in waste heat a gigawatt of power generation for every gigawatt it carries, is elevated in the Scottish Government’s understanding of energy to the category of a fuel, and also greatly expanded.
Hydrocarbon and nuclear—actual fuels—provide the energy to manufacture and endlessly replace wind turbines and solar panels. They also, in Scotland, provide the power sources that run under all conditions to ensure continuity of energy supply during Scotland’s frequent sunless and windless conditions. These are to be discontinued.
Like all advanced economies, Scotland cannot tolerate even a small measure of power supply fluctuation. Without firm dispatchable thermal standby generation capacity to smooth supply fluctuation, the eventual daily ~40GW amplitude power fluctuation resulting from the proposed expansion of weather dependent electrical generation must be adapted for use in some other way. This will be provided by some form of 180+ day, grid-scale electricity storage—a technical challenge for which no precedent exists, and therefore no cost estimate is available.5
No technology candidate for grid scale battery storage technology exists, either today or in the foreseeable future. It occupies a prominent role in The Scottish Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan.
Converting surplus energy to hydrogen for storage and use at grid scale is unprecedented, wasteful, and fraught with risk. 50% of Scotland’s proposed new intermittent generation capacity, installed at a capital cost of around £26 billion, will be wasted in converting its output to hydrogen.
Hydrogen embrittles pipework, renders conventional valves ineffective and, unlike domestic gas, self-ignites under catastrophic decompression. Quantifying the risks of transporting it in bulk on Scottish roads and deploying it as a substitute for domestic gas in Scotland’s densely populated housing estates might be an exciting 10 year research project at the UK Government’s Spadeadam industrial hazard testing facility (“…the remoteness of the area is key to their operations” – Wikipedia”).
But, informed by what the Scottish Government claims is the need for “the fastest possible” transition, it will bypass thorough safety testing and impose live hydrogen trials on Scotland’s citizens. Hydrocarbon gas is to be phased out of Scottish homes from 2030.
Energy densities in energy storage sites located next to Scotland’s towns and cities required by the Scottish Government’s reckless abandonment of thermal standby generation capacity will be measured in millions of tonnes of TNT—a risk for which 12 feet thick reinforced concrete containment domes are installed around nuclear facilities to manage. These risks are entirely unrecognised by Scotland’s current planning processes (or citizens).
The wind turbines, which real-world data shows reach the end of their economic life after only 11 years, will be endlessly resupplied from factories in China powered by coal generation plants larger, and very much dirtier, than the recently blown up one they replace.
The cost of adaptive storage, the cost of the new transmission and distribution infrastructure required by dramatically increased electrification of Scotland’s relatively sparsely populated areas, and the cost of Carbon Capture, are not factored into current estimates of Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE). These are vast. Grid scale battery storage, for example, has an implied cost measured in trillions of pounds, and drives LCOE from £50/MWh to over £600/MWh.
Apparently unaware of the role of nuclear and gas in maintaining continuity of supply, and the prohibitive cost of electricity storage as a substitute, the Scottish Government confidently demands that the UK Government “break the link between the price of electricity and the cost of gas to help realise the benefits of the low costs [sic] of renewable electricity”.
The policy proposal cites a number of other benefits that it thinks will accrue in addition to the negligible reduction in the Earth’s temperature.
Electric vehicles can’t plough snow or fields, harvest corn, empty buckets, excavate ore, raise wind-turbine masts, or perform any other economic task for which “grunt” is required. Notwithstanding, from 2030, diesel and petrol engines will be prohibited. Car kilometers are to be “reduced”—possibly, by fining us if we travel from our home more than a permitted distance. 6
Author Julien Harneis, source Wikimedia.
The Scottish Government will impose further catastrophic environmental damage on the non-OECD countries where millions of tonnes of toxic water and ores are processed to manufacture the EV batteries it is mandating. It will overlook the human rights violations endemic to China’s “clean energy industry”. These will have the benefit of promoting what it calls “A Just Transition”—supposedly, a socialist framework for ensuring “a fairer, greener future for all”.7
Our security of supply is to be further enhanced by transferring energy generation from domestically produced oil and gas to mechanically unreliable, weather dependent energy scavenging devices containing thousands of points of failure that are contingent on the supply of rare resources controlled by China—which the US states it will declare war on if it invades Taiwan.8
These weather dependent energy scavenging devices require oil for, amongst many other things, the manufacture of their advanced composite materials. A leading energy consultancy records the collapse in 2020 to an 80 year low of replacement oil discovery volumes, and estimates that Western oil firms now have around 15 years of remaining economic oil reserves.9
It is under these circumstances that the Scottish Government is further enhancing the security of Scotland’s energy supply by discontinuing onshore and offshore conventional and unconventional oil and gas exploration.
To reinforce this enhancement, noting “the damage done by the de-industrialisation of central belt communities in the 1980’s”, the Scottish Government is irreversibly disbanding the North East’s oil and gas industry communities and, with them, their 50 years of institutional knowledge of oil and gas operations.
These will be replaced with communities based on livelihoods sustained by a “clean energy industry”. The growth of this imaginary industry is funded with the imaginary capital (a.k.a. “quantitive easing”) excreted in the response—ironically—to the energy contraction that triggered the ongoing 2008 Great Financial Crash. During this time, UK national debt has risen from 60% to over 100% of Gross Domestic Product, exceeded only by the public sector pension deficit (a proxy for the replacement of real industries in the global economy by imaginary ones), which has risen to more than £2 trillion.10
As evidence of the sustainability of the policy of funding imaginary industries through the indefinite expansion of imaginary capital (for which, like much of this policy, no precedent exists in human history), the Scottish Government informs us that it has already allocated £5 billion of its record budget deficit to what it refers to as “the Net Zero Economy”.
Winter excess death in the UK’s cold Northern European climate is already around 25,000 a year.11
Any prolonged interruption of winter energy supply created by the failure of this policy, or further escalation of cost, will plausibly result in the deaths of thousands more of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. The magnitude and uncertainty of the implied costs, coupled to the scale of the energy contraction that this policy deliberately seeks to accelerate, could trigger the collapse of our financial system.
Irreversible impairment of either our energy or financial systems would have a catastrophic impact on the welfare of Scotland’s citizens. Few have expressed any desire, much less informed consent, for risk on the scale proposed for such little benefit.
Yet the project, representing a scope of unprecedented scale, cost, pace, and technical uncertainty, will be overseen by a Government that is currently struggling to procure two relatively modest ferries for less than the cost that other governments can procure 34 ferries—due to cost overruns associated with the attempt to employ novel technologies to reduce CO2 emissions.12
As evidence of the extent to which the Scottish Government and its advisers have become unmoored from physical reality by the climate catastrophe hypothesis, it’s a document that is fascinating to read, and alarming to contemplate.
After reflecting on it, you may care to offer your feedback, either to the department that compiled it, or your political representative,13 or on social media.
I’d welcome your thoughts below, in advance of future essays examining in closer detail the comparably alarming Scottish and UK “Net Zero Energy” policies.
References
1 MAGICC – the climate system in a nutshell’. https://magicc.org/
2 Scottish Government. 2023. ‘Draft Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan’. https://www.gov.scot/publications/draft-energy-strategy-transition-plan/documents/
3 Elexon. “Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service”. https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=help/about-us
4 Hughes, Gordon. 2020. ‘Wind Power Economics – Rhetoric and Reality’. https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/365-wind-power-economics-rhetoric-and-reality.
5 Lyon, Richard. 2023. ‘Wind energy is cheaper than fossil fuel! (Batteries not included)’. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/renewable-electricity-now-cheaper-than-fossil-fuel-33-richard-lyon/
6 Spiked. 2022. “The madness of the ‘15-minute city’”. https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/25/the-madness-of-the-15-minute-city/
7 Scottish Government. 2022. “Just Transition Commission”. https://www.gov.scot/groups/just-transition-commission/
8 FT. 2022. “Dangerous fatalism about a US-China war”. https://www.ft.com/content/457d8f06-a1cf-43d2-944c-90b5a48e66f9
9 Rystad Energy. 2021. “Big Oil Could See Proven Reserves Run out in Less than 15 Years as Output Is Not Replaced by Discoveries”. https://web.archive.org/web/20210511193735/https://www.rystadenergy.com/newsevents/news/press-releases/big-oil-could-see-proven-reserves-run-out-in-less-than-15-years-as-output-is-not-replaced-by-discoveries/
10 Pensions Expert. 2022. “Public sector pension liabilities break £2tn with 16% surge”. https://www.pensions-expert.com/DB-Derisking/Public-sector-pension-liabilities-break-2tn-with-16-surge?ct=true
11 AgeUK. 2016. “Excess winter deaths: a chilling reminder of how the cold affects older people” https://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-news/archive/excess-winter-deaths-are-a-chilling-reminder-of-how-the-cold-affects-older-people/
12 Wikipedia. “Ferry fiasco”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferry_fiasco
13 Scottish Parliament. “Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs)” https://www.parliament.scot/mspshttps://www.parliament.scot/msps
Scotland; an exporter of fine whiskeys! Apparently the Scottish government has been doin g a Grand Tour of the glens and sampling far more than they ought! How else do you explain an energy policy that tries to outdo Energiewende just as the Germans are being forced to their knees by the harsh reality of winter weather! Perhaps the Scot’s propensity for self-flagellation pushes them to outdo those suffering from Unreliable Energy! I guess we will soon find out what a post-Enlightenment world looks like.
I recommend investing in several bottles of your favorite Scotch whiskey; they will probably become far more expensive soon, and the Scots may need future bottlings for winter heating!
The authorities are setting up the excuse for future grid failure:
“Not our fault, we were drunk”.
Scotland doesn’t export, or indeed make, any whiskey, although it imports some liquids which are believed by some to give a similar effect to the product made here which is called whisky.
And here I thought that they couldn’t spell very well! My bad!
Where is ‘here’?
Booze from Scotland is popularly called ‘whiskey’, as in Scotch whisky – Wikipedia.
Yes, the term ‘whiskey’ came from boozing Ireland, though you may not like taste of the first versions.
The SNP are working on abolishing whisky.
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/snps-insane-whisky-levy-plan-27585534
Irn Bru only! P.S. Scotch has no ‘e’. Whiskey is either Irish or American.
Do an internet search for types of whiskey, and get back to me! There was no “e” in slave originally; ask the Slavs how well that worked out!
Uisge Beatha, the original Scottish gaelic for whisky.
The term ‘Slav’ does not come from the term ‘slave’.
Irn Bru but with a huge sugar tax.
Aaaack! The ePolice are attacking! I’ve got a buch uv some Brit with 154 sonnets that are in dire need policing! He couldn’t spell worth a damn; probably too much ry whisky!
Whisky in Scotland, Whiskey in Ireland
after a while it doesn’t matter and it’s all just drink
Here’s thoughts: Are conspiracy theorists true believers, or are they just acting out fantasies? (theconversation.com)
Climate goons are a form of conspiracy theorist, often violent.
Solar power in Scotland has always been a joke. However, this didn’t prevent solar farms being built in Scotland with the help of gigantic subsidies. The idiocy of this cannot be overstated since solar farms in Scotland produce power at just 1% of capacity in winter.
http://euanmearns.com/solar-pv-potential-in-scotland/
In addition to that, there is not the cabling to take the power generated at peak times by the windmills in Scotland down to England. So if their power is not needed they are paid for it anyway at the inflated subsidy rate BUT if they can sell the power to a non-grid user they are allowed to AND get paid for that as well. Similar to the systems of bits of paper for generating renewable energy that can be sold to suppliers….and then the actual electricity generated can be sold as well. Everything about the whole wind, solar and biomass industry stinks to high heaven.
Too much wind power for the cables they have, and nobody wants to pay for bigger/more cables to get the power off the Orkney Islands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UmsfXWzvEA
“to the negligible reduction in the Earth’s temperature (from Scotland)”
It’s long past time to throw the “We are too small to matter” argument in the garbage can. It is not logical and is stupid.
If there was really a climate emergency, every nation would be expected to do their part in slowing CO2 emissions. 190 of the 195 nations could claim their emissions were too small to matter — let the top five do all the heavy lifting. Do you think the top five would say okay — we’ll do it all — you don’t have to participate? Of course not. The other 190 nations would at least be punished in some way by the Top 5.
Based on that faulty “we’re too small to matter” logic, I could tell a judge: “Sure I stole a $20 item from that store, but that’s only a tiny percentage of total retail theft at the store, so I should not be punished. It’s too small to matter”. That would not work with a judge.
Exactly. And as every nation is not doing their part, it is clear that there is no climate emergency.
China matters. India matters. Scotland, not so much. If the plan involves Scotland
but not China and India, the plan is pointless.
If there is a climate emergency, then the plan would not be pointless. We shut down the world for Covid. We transformed economies through QE after the global financial
crisis. But for climate we just have repetitive COP talking shops and no action.
The issue here is that Scotland is breaking with the climate consensus of the last thirty years. That consensus being; look, discuss but don’t waste any resources acting on it.
And for what? Why are they taking this reckless action?
Nothing. The plan is expected to have no discernible effect.
Seriously, for Scotland’s policy to work it needs to be broken down into:
Step 1: Win a war with China.
Step 2: …
That’s not a good policy.
Over 7 billion of the 8 billion people in the world live in nations that could not care less about nut Zero, including China, India, Russia and every less developed nation. So Nut Zero must fail.
If there was really a climate emergency, China. India and Russia among others would be forced to participate in Nut Zero. Certainly not ignored as they do nothing.
NOTE: There is no climate emergency.
That was just my hypothetical argument.
However I am building an ark in Michigan just in case.
The current climate is the best climate in 5000 years. It could only get better with more CO2 in the air and more warming in the 1975 to 2015 pattern. I have advocated for 800ppm or higher CO2 since 1997 to boost growth of C3 plants (90% of 300,000 plant species) to allow our planet to support more human and animal life.
Pro-CO2 is Pro-life.
CO2 is the staff of life for our planet and 420ppm CO2 is too low.
800PPM would do, but I prefer a wider safety-margin to allow for idiot politicians. Say 1,000ppm!
Apply CO2 Control-Knob Limit Theory.
Crank the thing all the way over and readjust as necessary.
What’s the big deal?
Russia… Seems like they’d be in the “net winner” of AGW camp. All that cold Siberia to become more accessible.
And China and India would not participate in Niut Zero unless there really was a climate emergency, and all the other nations were participating in Nut Zero too, not just them.
The two cases are not the same, and the argument from size in the case of emissions is valid.
In the theft case the law is being broken, penalties for so doing are provided, and are enforced.
In the second case, what is being proposed is action of some sort. The action in Scotland is justified “because climate”, or to ‘tackle climate change”.
The counter argument is very simple: the proposed actions will have no effect on the climate. Therefore do not do them.
If there were a global plan to reduce global emissions, and each nation had a quota as part of that plan, there would be a valid argument for each nation to do its assigned part. But there is not. And the interesting thing is that Scotland’s actions are not being justified on those grounds. In fact, there is no connected argument justifying them at all.
The Scots, like the British, like the West as a whole, have to act in a situation in which, like it or not, whatever they do, actions by the rest of the world will raise emissions. The rest of the world, China, India etc, are raising their emissions as fast as is required to deliver the economic growth they are aiming for.
In this circumstance the question of size becomes important. Its quite reasonable to argue that in the world as it is, for country A to reduce its emissions will have no useful effect. Note that this argument cannot be made by China, solely on account of size. Chinese reductions do have the potential materially to affect global emissions. British or Scottish ones, not.
In the situation as it is the British and Scots also should be trying to decide if climate change is a real threat, if so how it will manifest, and then what is the best thing for them to do to protect their own people against the threat. Which will not, any more than for the Maldives, involve reducing emissions.
The lesson of the policy described in the lead post is that this is yet another instance of Scotland, or the combination SNP and Greens, going off the rails. They have gone off the rails with the Gender Bill, which would allow any sixteen year old boy to change his birth certificate to show he was born a girl. They have gone off the rails with the hate crime Act, which criminalizes politically incorrect private conversations in the privacy of one’s own home. They have also gone off the rails on Net Zero and fossil fuels, and an attack on the Scottish petroleum industry. And Sturgeon has also made noises about the Scottish whisky industry. Yes, because climate!
John Knox had it right half a millenium ago:
Spending hundreds of $$$ to prosecute a $20 theft is as rational.
I am going to pretend for a moment I think there is a climate emergency.
As a tiny contributor to CO₂ the greater duty of the UK (and Scottish) governments is to protect the economic well-being of their citizens. Sacrificing our economy in a frantic rush to be the first to leave the party is unnecessary for the world good. We can afford to wait to see what works. We will conserve our treasure and perhaps some of our prosperity.
“…the greater duty of the UK (and Scottish) governments is to protect the economic well-being of their citizens.”
Had you said that 30 or 40 years ago, it would ring reasonably true. But today it most certainly does not:
“World temperatures are rising because of human activity, and climate change now threatens every aspect of human life.
Left unchecked, humans and nature will experience catastrophic warming, with worsening droughts, rising sea levels and mass extinction of species.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24021772
The implication is clear – to me, at least.
The implication is that something must be done that works.
It’s easy to throw a virgin down a volcano or cut CO2 emissions. Although in Scotland finding CO2 emissions may be the easier option.
But neither will do anything about the problem you say you are concerned with.
Therefore, we can conclude that:
A) CO2 is not a problem because if it were, we would do something helpful – this policy is for another, unstated, purpose.
Or B) We’re all doomed anyway and the only policy that makes sense is to baffle people while stealing as much as you can on the way down.
In my opinion, it matters not if Scotland is following either A and B because the real motivation for the policy is the same in both cases.
If Scotland wants to go down, I don’t want it taking us down with it.
There is a climate emergency
It’s called Nut Zero — the plan to ruin electric grid reliability
That will become an emergency !
I’m getting down votes up the wazoo
This is one tough crowd
Keep it up and I’ll start posting my lame jokes.
Now you take my wife … PLEASE !
Took my wife to a wife swapping party
managed to swap her for an old tractor !!!
You might get a lesser sentence for your 20 quid compared to the 200k embezzled by the company accountant.
Sure mony a Mickle makes a muckle, but if it is an emergency then biggest is best. Once Scotland is biggest then perhaps it’s time for action?
In California, it’s a misdemeanor to steal like up to $950 per incidence with zero bail. I wonder why shoplifting has jumped there.
In Kansas it is a misdemeanor to steal under $1500, or damage property worth that. None the less, I had a client who did jail time for stealing $3.25. Actually, he did jail time because he could not successfully complete the 1 year probation. Either way, seemed excessive to me.
In California you can steal nearly $1000 of goods a day from stores and that is fine with the state.
We should return California to Mexico and demand back our $15 million with interest.
It’s so bad there all my leftist family members moved out !
Our last visit was in the late 1990s when the beggars and bums in Sausalito would not leave me alone — you’d think I had $100 bills sticking out of my pockets. The wife and I looked at each other and said — “We’re never going back to California” at the same time — and that was about 25 years ago. … The bums on the San Francisco streets must be much worse now.
It’s not just the bums lying on SF streets! I wonder if dog owners still have to clean up after their dogs?
Instead of returning Commiefornia to Mexico (which most of the immigrants don’t want,) how about turning SF and LA Counties into medium security prisons; walled off from the civilization they so despise!
‘…it’s o.k. Ricky, there is no such thing as too small, just come back to bed’.
Scotland, it has to be said, has become something of a basket case. The irony of it has been lost. When Bliar set devolution going he was of the mind that it was an event, rather than a [glacial] process. The electoral system was set up in such a way that the SNP could never win an outright majority. Well, that went well.
The real raison d’etre for the SNP is Scottish independence and a very strict adherence to globalist principles – ie dreams of rejoining the EU as a net recipient, not a payer – and all the progressive nonsense, especially the trans issue. Many believe Sturgeon has found a way to push for independence by challenging UK law.
If you want a measure of Stalin’s little girl, her government could have awarded turbine contracts to Scottish yards a few miles from the Seagreen development site. But instead they sent the ‘green’ jobs out to China and the UAE.
“Work to build Seagreen turbine jackets heading to firms thousands of miles away”
https://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/fifes-bifab-loses-out-to-china-and-uae-in-scottish-wind-farm-bid-2977274
Of course, this is what is needed to bring those emissions down – Ehrlich’s fabled de-development. How can you possibly bring down emissions without de-industrialising? You simply can’t.
Blair’s devolution left one nation without an assembly or parliament of its own and no party in Parliament will change that. They fear England for some strange reason and insist on trying to break it up by regionalising it. But that hasn’t worked. As it stands this is how the money is divvied up:
“In 2021/22, public spending per person in the UK was
Scotland: £13,881 (17% above the UK average)
Wales: £13,401 (13% above the UK average)
Northern Ireland: £14,062 (18% above the UK average)
England: £11,549 (3% below the UK average)
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04033/
Personally I’m in favour of Scottish independence. I bet many other English people are, too. In the end we might have [just] thrown off the shackles of Bruxelles, but Westminster has yet to be reckoned with. Lookout Gumboot.
When Scotland becomes independent the SNP will split into two, possibly more, factions.
It’s what happens to almost all separatist groups.
I can’t confess to being much bothered about that. As they say, that’s their problem
Will they be known as ‘clans’ and each wear a different tartan?
So imagine this scenario:
The Scottish independence question is put to a vote of the entire UK population and a majority in favour arises due to a huge majority in favour amongst English voters for Scottish independence but in Scotland the vote fails to obtain a majority.
Would the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon then take that as a mandate for Scottish Independence?
Because I suspect if it was put to a UK wide vote the English might vote with a majority in favour. I know I would.
The latest polling is that a second referendum would fail decisively. But there’s an interesting question: what would happen if it succeeded?
The current mad policies would continue, climate/energy, gender, poltical correctness on speech. Every crazed US woke fad would be taken up enthusiastically by the SNP. This is a nation which gave the world the Scottish Enlightenment, and which is now cancelling its leading light, David Hume on account of something to do with Black Lives Matter.
The current subsidies from the rest of the country which permit Scotland to run huge deficits would stop. So this would lead either to higher taxes or austerity on a grand scale. There would be a serious financial problem of what currency to use. At the moment they are talking about continuing to use Sterling. But that means being at the mercy of English monetary policy while having no say.
The SNP would probably try to apply for EU membership and discover to its astonishment that this required joining the Euro (which would require grand scale austerity) and having a hard border at the Tweed. And it would take years, not months, during which time the economy would continue headed south, helped enormously by the SNP-Green assault on the oil industry.
The deluded effort to run the country on wind and sun alone is not going to stop in the face of a few blackouts.
The combination of financial bust, collapsing services and increasing authoritarianism from the SNP would provoke a mass migration to England, both of people and of companies and of money.
At some point the SNP would be driven to the same conclusion that the GDR came to, that it was a choice between depopulation or closing the borders and banning travel south. It would also be faced with a choice between dramatic and radical policy reversals or being unelected by a landslide, or suspending elections.
Its a measure of how far and how fast Scotland has declined that it is no longer obvious what the SNP would choose.
I probably sound bitter and angry. No, more grieving. For the Scotland of my youth, a nation with intellectual gravitas, distinctive but determinedly liberal traditions in thought and policy. Compare the present leadership to John Smith, and regret what was lost when he died. If only…
The first thing would have to be that Scots may not move to England, as most of them would want to. Scots passports are not valid in the rest of the UK etc. An amazing mess would result. Of course the English funding and use of the pound would have to stop completely, otherwise the Scotish bankruptcy would affect the pound in MY pocket, completely unacceptable! They would have to join NATO themselves, another 3% of their tiny GDP gone. Silly Woman!
You know …. If someone bought a few acres, built some houses, an office building or two, a Quick Mart and machine shop … and then powered them with a “renewable” wind turbine, some solar panels and a bunch of batteries …
If they then found a few people to live and work in them when the sun was shining and the wind blowing … and live and not work in them on cloudy and windless days … it might teach a few lessons.
Thinking more … I wonder why there hasn’t been such a thing built already by proponents of renewable energy.
Pssst! You don’t talk about the con until the con is over and the mark has been fully fleeced!
It has been built. El Hierro in the Canary Islands.
Intended to achieve 100% renewable power, it struggles to manage 50%. And one can assume it was chosen to have the best chance of success.
50% is not adjusted for the CO2 emissions / electricity used to build products used there that are manufactured elsewhere
Maybe, but if they could make it work, it would serve as proof of concept that the transition could actually happen. If the rest of the world accepted that proof and transitioned, that would take care of the CO2 emissions.
I’m not at all suggesting that any such transition is possible, by the way, just addressing the logic.
Every small Nut Zero electricity pilot project has been a failure so there will be no more pilot projects.
Oh no?
They need to cull the population down to the number who can survive on the power generated.
If they did that, the remaining “elite” would have to figure out how to feed themselves, and drive their corroding EVs on pot-holed and rapidly deteriorating roads.
El Hierro was only ever capable of instantaneous running on renewables on windy days, using the penstocks of the hydro system to recirculate water with pumping and generation providing no more than stabilisation. The reservoirs are far too small to act as storage. The “motores diesel” frequently have to spring into action.
I thought some Danish island was experimenting with renewable utopia but not anything for years so I guess it didn’t work.
Samso Island, Denmark
In spite of unusually good winds there, they burn a lot of garbage for electricity and have to import lots of garbage too. They call that “green” which is a deliberate lie … meaning the leftist articles about Samso are lies, as you would expect.
And the islanders own products manufactured elsewhere with non-renewable energy too, such as electric cars and electric appliances.
I would like to confront the Irish Minster of Energy, Eamon Ryan, with these facts but he is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Ireland has a similar population to Scotland and energy ideas that are as ludicrous. There is a ban on the sale of peat to locals but the country has exported a large amount to Japan – 18,715 tonnes of peat and/or peat-based products over the last decade.
I should have added to this that while banning harvesting and selling peat in Ireland “several large shipments of peat for horticulture have been imported from the Baltic states over the last year (2021).”
How is this any different from shipping off manufacturing to places like China that produce far more CO2 than a modern Western country would but then importing the slave labor products from them?
I think that the hydrogen storage option would be a really good start – they could run some trials at Holyrood and see how it works out. At the same time some remote trials at Westminster, The Senned and Stormont could help confirm how safe and useful hydrogen can be.
Politicians across the world continue to show that their ambitions far exceed their abilities. They are underqualified and overvalued right down to every last man, woman and yet to be defined!
Net zero sums up the maximum value that they bring to the table.
This stuff would be funny if it wasn’t so depressingly wasteful!
And dangerous.
There will be casualties.
Guy Fawkes would have fun.
Gas F***ks the the ruling classes!
I haven’t read this post yet. I will. But the phrase “Energy Strategy and Just Transition plan” provokes me.
Asserting something is “just” is a thought-terminating cliché. It puts us on notice that no dissent nor even due diligence will be entertained. Someone has their hand on the lever—or they have reason to think they do.
[Edit: infelicitous turn of phrase fixed]
Thought “just” was a legal term. They plan to use the Justice Department to enforce compliance as it won’t be poular.
But you are probably right that they are not that honest.
Yes. Yet another example of Orwellian language used by the progressives
After all – who doesn’t want to be just and progressive?
I always want to be just. I do not always want to be progressive. People who consider themselves progressive have constantly to “progress”.
Change for change sake. Turmoil, in effect.
Gotta laugh ain’t ya…
2 points:
1/ Scotland has immense amounts of potential renewable energy.
It is very windy there. Oddly enough, that’s why next-to-nobody lives there.
Anyway, they already have lots of windmills but need to export the ‘produce’ and that’s where they come unstuck – the transmission capacity was for carrying a modest amount of power from England into Scotland and **not** for moving immense amounts out of Scotland ##
2/ Of all the places on this Earth that are net absorbers of Thee Heathen Molecule, Scotland has the very best. Really it does.
Because under the grouse moors (huntin shootin nottalotta fishin), top-soil is being created by the mosses, heathers and grasses at a rate of one inch every 150 years
Maybe not sound a lot but, do some (haha) digging to realise that that is is fooking epic
Compare to almost everywhere else, especially where the tasteless & toxic mush we call food is grown, top-soil is being consumed at a rate of one inch per decade.
Consumed mind you. Lost. Eroded. Destroyed. Gone forever.
And that is where the Mass Extinction is happening – inside the actual greenhouse, inside the “A Horizon”
## From my days as ‘peasant’ I’d oft be seen venturing to the livestock market at Carlisle, last outpost of civilization before Scotland. Said place being slap bang next to Junction 43 of the M6 motorway. (H&H auctions= “We sell anything as long as it’s legal“)
And running right over the top of the junction and always hanging real low (I’ll recount the tale another time) was The Main UK West-side transmission line from England <> Scotland
With my electrical engineer hat on it gave me the creeps driving under it. It hung so low that with the car window open, the static made the hairs on your arm stand up, It really did.
But much much worse, one of the insulators up there was failing because, for years and years and years, it made the most awful buzzing noise you ever heard.
As the Elec Eng I am/was, it frightened me. Not least there was a main road and a motorway for it to land on if it fell.
However, when last seen as I was leaving Cumbria, they were reinstalling all the wires up there, with some very phat pieces of wire.
Hadn’t quite finished when I’d left for good
“It is very windy there. “
Have you seen Holyrood?
“Oddly enough, that’s why next-to-nobody lives there.”
Oddly enough it costs us a fortune per capita.
“bi turas math…”
It’s an occasional country operated by a full-time government. Just don’t call it reliable.
Trendy hair shirts notwithstanding, cascading human-rights abuses notwithstanding, the Green Monster feeding its hungry maw notwithstanding, has not a single one of these gits ever been cold? One notes the snowy mountains behind the power plant being blown up. It’s all a bit much. #WinterGames
As part of its plan to make Scotland Net Zero, the Scottish Government has this particular aim:
“work to decarbonise scheduled flights within Scotland by 2040.”
https://www.transport.gov.scot/media/47052/national-transport-strategy.pdf (Page 50)
Good luck with that one.
They obviously don’t know the meaning of the word “work”!
I think I’ve found one issue. In reference 2, the word “Draft” has an extra “r” in it….
Scotland’s “Energy Strategy and Just Transition plan” is a disaster in the making.
No, it’s not.
Like most governmental decisions nowadays, it is designed to secure the position of the Establishment and enable them to order the lives of the ‘little people’ in minute detail.
Setting up an energy crisis, during which people will need to stay in their homes (no transport) and be kept alive (or not) by regulated food provision seems to be an ideal way to maintain your hold over people. Which is what (I suppose) the plan is intended to do…
A wee sang for Scotland To the tune of “Scots wha hae wei Wallace bled ”
and bearing in mind that the 25th is Robert Burns anniversary, here is ma wee bit o doggerel. – Like our national pride , our poetry has taken a turn for the worse over the last 250 years
Scots wha wint a wund turbine
Scots wha cannae tel loon frae quine
Wi’ a lot o urgin’ gang wi’ Sturgeon
for our independent mind
Scots wha wint a Euroloan
Scots wad worship at Van Lyden’s throne
Scots wha wint an NHS Bed
we’ll mak’ the Sassenach pay
When the oil is doon the drain
We’ll stand again all alane
Beg like Greeks wi’ ragged breeks
Scotland wull be free “
<i>Apparently unaware of the role of nuclear and gas in maintaining continuity of supply, and the prohibitive cost of electricity storage as a substitute, the Scottish Government confidently demands that the UK Government “break the link between the price of electricity and the cost of gas to help realise the benefits of the low costs [sic] of renewable electricity”</i>
Naturally!
Typical SNP carry on. Bad accounting and slope’y shoulders. Westminster holds them back.
(from themselves)
Many of the best Scots are in England. Some keep property in Scotland, it seems.
It’s as if Scotland’s Home Alone, with Sturgeon running things into the ground. Wish she’d have resigned like the NZ PM…just noticed the italics font thing under the comment box.
How could a country that produced some of the best inventors, engineers, and scientists in history be brought so low?
lady liberty left … replaced by lady leadership.
What everyone is overlooking is the fact that the burning of fossil fuels also produces SO2 aerosols (which are a mist of fine Sulfuric Acid droplets)., They are reflective and cool the Earth’s surface by reflecting away incoming solar radiation.
Hence, the cleaner the air becomes, the warmer our climate will become. (See image for present day conditions)
Historically, the Minoan, Roman, and Medieval warm periods were eras where there were very few volcanic eruptions, and consequently, most of the time, the atmosphere was free of dimming SO2 aerosols, and temperatures were 1 to 2 deg. warmer than today (constantly in an El Nino temperature range).
An image for the MWP like the one shown would have been totally white.
During El Ninos we have experienced periods of drought, famines, excessive rainfall, heat waves, cold waves, heavy snowfalls, severe winters, the demise of earlier cultures, etc., and the same occurred during the other warm eras, but not just temporarily, as we have experienced since the LIA
The point is that Net Zero .will inevitably cause temperatures to rise to those of the earlier eras, unless volcanic eruptions, or industrial activity (as now by China and India) provide enough SO2 to prevent the warming.
And NO ONE that I am aware of has ever proven that rising levels of CO2 will cause planetary warming. It is just an unproven hypothesis.
Trudeau of Canada just created the “Just Transition” proposal to kill the Western economy – and, incidentally, its political power.
This “Just Transition ” sounds like a memo from above thing Davos? Klaus already praised Trudeau as one of their disciples emplaced in governments.
Who else? A true cabal?
There is obviously no limit to Scottish lunacy!
U of Edinburgh says the windmill grid will not work. It will not take you to net zero. So, the Basket Weaver PhDs in government conclude we have to double double-up and double down on windmills to generate hydrogen for net zero electricity and motive fuels! Decided … without feasibility.
This, in a nutshell, is the pattern of wokey science. Alarmist studies I have read always conclude the worst is in store, when a proper evaluation of the data is a better fit with an entirely different and benign conclusion, or is inconclusive, or the study design is unacceptible (pouring neat hydrochloric acid into a fish tank to test ocean acidification on shellfish coral). Coral/fish disaster porn science deeply flawed:
https://www.science.org/content/article/analysis-challenges-slew-studies-claiming-ocean-acidification-alter-fish-behavior
One wonders . . .
Brilliant! Scottish Inventors, Innovators, Scientists and Engineers Who Changed the World | Book | Austin Macauley Publishers
. . . did all of their offspring leave — and should others follow?
I expect nothing less from Sturgeon and her brain-dead followers. As an anti-nuclear government, I assume they will refuse to import nuclear generated electricity when their lights go out.
SNP = Stupid Nonsensical Pricks!
I predict a new field of academia will evolve which will study the effects of crowd sourced hysteria on public policy.
Gotta figure out a name, any suggestions?
I’m thinkin Thunbergian Radiation Practicum.
Get yourself a south facing cave before it’s too late!
Oh, goody, prophesy fulfilled; a suitcase-sized hydrogen bomb in every home!
As a retired Engineer living in Scotland. I despair about the apparent lack of critical thinking skills in all of our mainstream UK politicians when it comes to Energy Policy. The SNP appear to be the worst of the bunch. This article is a well written expose of their dangerous misguided ideas that will continue to undermine the Economy and lead to increased poverty and deaths due to hypothermia. Kudos to this website for allowing the truth to be presented and discussed.
From the article: “As evidence of the extent to which the Scottish Government and its advisers have become unmoored from physical reality by the climate catastrophe hypothesis, it’s a document that is fascinating to read, and alarming to contemplate.”
Excellent article!
Scotland’s leaders are definitely unmoored from reality and this author has described the disconnection in a very entertaining way.
Scotland’s leaders have no idea what they are doing. They will only figure it out after everything crashes and burns.
Scotland will become another crash-test dummy. There are getting to be quite a number of these crash-test dummies. The question now is which one of these loony climate change plans will crash and burn first.
Maybe “crash and burn” is not the proper description. It looks to me like there is already a slow-motion crash and burn going on as energy problems force companies to relocate out of Germany and Britain. So the slow-motion crash and burn is going on right now as delusional Western leaders let their unreasonable fear of CO2 overwhelm their common sense and causes them to do very stupid, destructive things as a consequence.
All based on a lie about the temperature record.
‘jus transition’ is the scam that Canadian PM ‘jefe’ Trudeau Jr. is peddling to con Albertans into not realizing the extent of job losses from his attacks on the petroleum industry.
Supposedly a great many workers can transition to ‘clean energy’ projects.
(Perhaps amusing is that Athabasca oil sands miners say there will be many jobs in actions to de-carbonize their production – but jTj wants them to stop mining.)
Promise of gummint handouts did not come true for the coal industry earlier.