Scottish Renewable Electricity

Scottish wind farm mapToday, The Scotsman newspaper reports on a paper submitted to the Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) Board that paints a very positive picture of the current and future status of renewable electricity generation capacity in Scotland.

The SNH paper states that

2,834MW of renewables were up and running, and another 3,739MW had been granted consent, but was yet to be built. Another 9,000MW of onshore renewables are in the planning system as well as 8,500MW offshore wind and up to 2,000MW of marine renewables by 2020.

According to The Scotsman, that all adds up to 26,073MW – enough to meet Scotland's targets of 50% renewable electricity three times over.

This projection appears to be even more optimistic than the Power of Scotland report mentioned in an earlier blog, and in part reflects the wind capacity figures collated by the BWEA.

According to Professor Roger Crofts, of the Crichton Carbon Centre in Dumfries,

"We have spent far too much time debating energy supply and we've not spent enough time on reducing the consumption of energy.

"The greatest source of energy use in Scotland is in the home - 34%. Two-thirds of that energy consumption in the home is space heating.

"We tend always to talk about switching off the light, switching off the television and the computer but it's heating the space in the house which is the critical point."

Given that we will have an excess of renewable electricity generation capacity and face depleting natural gas production and that two-thirds of our energy consumption in the home is down to space heating, it would appear sensible to transition to electricity for heating.

Efficiently.

Using eco cute heat pumps.

If we simply switched the 15% of households currently heated by electricity in Edinburgh to eco cute heat pumps with a seasonal coefficient of performance of 3, we could provide approximately 45% of all household heating in Edinburgh using no additional energy.

Quite a thought.