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Scotland to use 100% renewables on time to host 2020 climate summit
- Ididntdothis 7y agoWhen I was there I thought to myself that their wind could probably power the whole world. I have never been to a place with that much wind.
- hinkley 7y agoDid you see that Discovery Channel show where they documented the building of a giant oil platform for oil extraction in the North Sea? All of the things (and forces) they had to deal with... wow. The North Sea has a -lot- of energy in it, and climate change will probably accentuate that.
- dasanman 7y agoYeah this is also why the west coast of Denmark is full of wind mills
- c0restraint 7y agoI'd agree. Ireland is fairly windy too
- arethuza 7y agoAn ex-colleague of mine who moved to Scotland from Spain was amazed when he first came here at how fast our clouds move!
- Camas 7y ago>Scotland [...] has a goal to source the equivalent of 100% of its electricity demand from renewable energy sources by the end of this year. What does 'equivalent' mean in this sentence?
- brailsafe 7y agoMy thought was that it was a way of saying net zero use of renewables as in io. But I don't know if that makes any sense.
- est31 7y agoScotland does not have an independent grid. There is an EU wide market to trade electric energy between countries. Some days they export elecric energy, other days they import it. Even if 100% of their local production is renewable, the energy they import is probably (partly) not. So I guess the 'equivalent' means that summed up over the entire year, they export at least the same amount of energy that they import. You can check this site for the present state (it doesn't show scotland though): https://www.electricitymap.org/ https://www.electricitymap.org/
- toomuchtodo 7y agoMight change with Brexit (re independent grid).
- Rexxar 7y agoThey have nothing to win to do this.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoI’m not arguing the rationality, only the possible outcome. Texas has its own grid (ERCOT) because Texas. Humans are quirky.
- duxup 7y agoIs that likely? Hard to imagine anyone wants to deal with that regardless of how they feel about Brexit. Plenty of independent nation's share grids.
- jussij 7y agoSince we are talking hypotheticals, if those pushing for Scottish independence get their way, sometime in the future Scotland may find itself out of the UK and back in the EU.
- viburnum 7y agoThis is great news but I wish people would start talking about total energy and not just electric generation. They’re still using a ton of gas and oil for heating and transportation. It would be good to be honest about this.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nateburke 7y agoThey are taking big steps to improve vehicle emissions, too, e.g. interest-free EV loans: https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/scotland/grants-loans/electric-vehicle-loan https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/scotland/grants-loans/elect...
- hinkley 7y agoI was kinda shocked to learn that long-haul natural gas pipelines are more efficient than long-haul power lines. They also tend not to fail during ice storms. The Greater Seattle Area has had whole areas without power for days or weeks within recent memory. It's not just an issue for old or rural areas. Putting all of your eggs into the electricity basket can get people killed. We should work on addressing these problems (or accepting energy diversity) sooner rather than later.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoEnergy diversity in a carbon constrained world mustn't embrace fracked natural gas. Methane leaks cause warming, and burning it still makes unacceptable levels of CO2. Diversity is valuable but we should install district heating systems and hydrogen pipelines and whatnot, not fracked gas plants.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- viburnum 7y agoNope, we need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground or Earth won't be suitable for human habitation.
- nikodunk 7y agoSpeaking of selling/buying energy equivalents, I’ve recently become addicted to great real-time data feeds like https://caiso.com https://caiso.com for California’s grid and Chrome/Firefox plugins to watch the data like https://twitter.com/EnergyLollipop/status/1221205820764897281?s=20 https://twitter.com/EnergyLollipop/status/122120582076489728...
- toomuchtodo 7y agoCheck out https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=map&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=map&solar=false&remote=... It scrapes any public grid/ISO operator’s site for live and historical electrical generation mix data.
- nikodunk 7y agoWow!! Hadn’t heard about it. Tmorow is also great for personal carbon tracking - trying them out as we speak.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoThey are great folks, hope you enjoy their products! ElectricityMap is open source; please consider politely poking grid operators not yet providing data for grayed out areas so that the map fills out!
- nl 7y agoThis is awesome. Opensource, too: https://github.com/tmrowco/ https://github.com/tmrowco/
- mmhsieh 7y agothe country that invented haggis is a natural leader in sustainable development
- mistrial9 7y agohuge achievement -- no equivocation -- congrats
- anonsivalley652 7y agoScotland is also coal power-free.
- blazespin 7y agoReally great of Scotland. Clearly the adults in the room. Unfortunately, the room is filled with 99.9% children and likely the only way to go at this point is to start seriously looking at carbon capture and storage. Sad, but time to face facts. The children are children and no amount of complaining has or will change that fact. Well, either that or find ways to enjoy a much warmer earth.
- tomThom 7y agoDo you eat meet?
- spodek 7y agoExcellent resource on this topic: Sustainability Without the Hot Air by David MacKay, a Caltech-trained Oxford physics professor. Free download: http://www.withouthotair.com/Contents.html http://www.withouthotair.com/Contents.html. In the article on Scotland, however, not one word on the most safe, economical, immediately available, and effective technique: reducing consumption. Trying to reach sustainability without lowering consumption feels like trying to make a company profitable without considering lowering costs. I haven't visited Scotland, but most Americans could reduce their energy consumption 75% or more purely improving their lives before any challenging decisions. --- A short description by MacKay of his book: "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" presents the numbers that are needed to answer these questions: - How huge are Britain's renewable resources, compared with our current energy consumption? - How big do renewable energy facilities have to be, to make a significant contribution? - How big would our energy consumption be if we adopted strong efficiency measures? - Which efficiency measures offer big savings, and which offer only 5 or 10%? - Do new much-hyped technologies such as hydrogen or electric cars reduce energy consumption, or do they actually make our energy problem worse? Wherever possible, I answer these questions from first principles.
- atoav 7y agoWhile I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of reducing energy consumption where it can be done I don't see why we shouldn't do both? And ofc there is always the danger of things like electric vehicles etc. becoming an case of indulgence: people paying to atone their sins. Consumption and shiny new things alone won't solve the climate emergency. For the UK the first thing that comes to my mind when thinking about inefficency is heating. I grew up in the alps and we usually have quite well insulated houses (incentivized by government). Using solar and heat exchangers is increasingly common etc. When I had been to England first, I was shocked at the building standards with these thin walls that barely keep the heat inside. On top they seem to heat a lot with electricity — something which you only would do in an emergency in the alps. If you can quickly save energy by modernizing heating and insulation go for it and expand renewables as well.
- lol768 7y ago
- littlestymaar 7y ago> has a goal to source the equivalent of 100% of its electricity demand from renewable energy sources by the end of this year. > production outstripping demand on 20 out of 30 days and over the whole month providing 109 per cent of electricity demand. Emphasis mine. This is a great summary of what really happens if you attempt to go full renewable on wind power: you don't control the supply so you need a foreign market to buy your excess production on windy days and to provide power the other days. And no, battery isn't really an option because you can have (and usually have, in anticyclonic conditions) weeks with low wind, and you won't get enough batteries to supply your country for one or more weeks. (I did a calculation for France bases on real power data 2 years ago, and it needed about 4 Tesla Model S battery per inhabitant).
- filmor 7y agoWind turbines are trivial to downregulate. The foreign market just allows you to shift the strike price for downregulation, making the generation in total more cost-efficient.
- littlestymaar 7y agoTechnically you can, but not financially: the advertised energy cost of wind power relies on the fact that turbines produce as much as they can, and in most European countries there has been contracts between windfarms owners and governments to guarantee a buying price, decorelated from the spot market price.
- thawaway1837 7y agoIt may be marketed that way in press releases, etc (although I don’t even think that’s true). But I bet you anything that the people investing in these projects, and the companies pricing their power and betting their future in them, are not doing it on the basis of selling every unit of energy generated.
- littlestymaar 7y ago
- macinjosh 7y agoMeanwhile a new mega factory is built in China erasing any and all of Scotland's effort.
- standardUser 7y agoChina is far and away the largest producer of renewable energy and renewable energy systems for export.
- ppf 7y agoChina is also far and away the largest consumer of coal.
- goatinaboat 7y agoBut aren’t 10s of 1000 of people flying in from all over the world for this “summit”? Let’s talk about renewables for powering videoconferencing, otherwise this is just a band aid.
- thawaway1837 7y agoI’m pretty sure a few percentage decrease in Scotland’s fossil fuel usage will make up for all those flights in a few weeks, never mind all the other countries that may be driven to do the same based on the outcome of the summit.
- mcjiggerlog 7y agoThis is somewhat misleading - it appears to be offsetting energy exported when there's particularly good conditions for renewables against times when there's not. In reality they are still both burning some fossil fuels and importing energy from countries that are burning fossil fuels. What really should matter is the carbon intensity of both electricity production and consumption. In terms of hard numbers for Scotland, their carbon intensity is 59 gCO2/KWh (https://www.carbonintensity.org.uk/ https://www.carbonintensity.org.uk/), which is actually pretty great. You can compare against other countries here - https://www.electricitymap.org https://www.electricitymap.org. Here's the current breakdown of their electricity production: Wind: 36.5% Nuclear: 31.1% Hydro: 16.7% Gas: 13.5% Biomass: 1.4% So right now they are 52.2% renewable energy. Presuming they are running renewables to capacity, this low carbon intensity figure is actually being kept low due to the fact they are sourcing a third of their load from nuclear. Should the Scottish government phase out nuclear as they are currently planning (https://www.gov.scot/policies/nuclear-energy/ https://www.gov.scot/policies/nuclear-energy/), then we can expect this carbon intensity to rise as gas is used to pick up the base load when conditions for renewables aren't favourable.
- elfexec 7y agoOf course it's misleading. It's PR/virtue signaling by wealthy privileged european nation. It's like how Ireland was one of the great recycling nations of the world. Did you know that they recycled nearly all of their plastic? Turns out that they just ship their plastic to china. https://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-plastic-waste-3786393-Jan2018/ https://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-plastic-waste-3786393-Jan2... Sort of like how Norway is pro-environmental and anti-fossil fuel nation. Did you know that they have a trillion dollar soveriegn wealth fund and they are courageous going to divest all investments in oil companies? Of course you did because of all the PR about their divestment. But did you know that the money in the trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund all came from the oil they sold? Did you know that norway is the 4th largest oil producer per capita? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ... Wealthy european countries love to virtue signal and pat themselves on the back and they are especially hypocritical about it.