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Half of Scotland's Energy Consumption Came From Renewables Last Year (heraldscotland.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an article on Herald Scotland: Scotland has met a key target for renewable energy consumption, according to official figures. Statistics published by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change show 57.7% of Scottish electricity consumption came from renewables in 2015 -- 7.7% ahead of the 50% target. The SNP welcomed the figures and pledged to bring forward plans to go further if re-elected in May. Deputy First Minister and SNP campaign director John Swinney said: "The SNP have long championed green energy and these new figures show the huge progress we have made - but we are determined to go even further.
That must be really poor if half of your energy production is consumed by your renewables. We finally know the truth that renewables consume energy... Or the editor doesn't know how to write a title!
Half of Scotland's ELECTRICITY Consumption Came From Renewables Last Year
Québec Canada is over 99% from renewable source... Title would be more impressive how fast they moved from fosil fuel... but 50% is still pretty low.
The summary has more words than the article. I had to check because I wasn't sure if renewables consumed or generated half of Scotland's Energy.
North Sea oil production peaked in 2000 and will be gone within the next 20 years
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
... like this bizarre episode with Riffgat in 2013? (But even Riffgat went into actual power production later.)
Whiskey is more or less renewable, so that follows.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Thermodynamic laws and all.
I'm not calling this story out for half-truths, but I'm not sure about this article. Renewables to me suggest nuclear, wind, solar, thermal, and tidal power. I'm pretty sure they're not big nuclear fans in Scotland and I don't think solar would work well (since they're so far north). So is 57% of electricity production really coming from wind, therma and tidal power? That would be a HUGE story, but I don't think that's realistically possible. Might this be misleading? 57% of net new electricity production is coming from renewables, not 57% of total generation?
Sharp readers will notice that the summary contradicts the headline, then makes a meaningless calculation, dividing apples by oranges.
First, as is typical of green fluff pieces, they conflate energy with electricity. Electricity accounts for about 35% of Ireland's energy usage. If renewables provided half of the -electricity-, that would be 17% of the -energy-.
Secondly, they've improperly conflated consumption with production. You could produce terawatts of energy in the summer and use to heat molten salt for a month and that does squat for you when the bulk of consumption is winter heating.
Roughly 8% of energy consumed was produced by renewable sources. This is hard to measure for certain, so call it 5%-15%.
Electricity consumption has dropped by 15% as prices have increased over the last five years in order to pay for the more-expensive renewables. If we add back the 15% of electricity people wanted but weren't able to use because it was too expensive, we get 35% of 35% = 12% of Ireland's energy needs were matched by their renewable production.
If the paragraph above doesn't isn't entirely clear, consider this. The government could shut down all gas pumps, all natural gas service, and most of the electric power plants, then correctly claim that 100% of their energy consumed was coming from renewables. That would be true, but horribly misleading because it measures energy consumed rather than energy demand - what people WANTED to use. The article has committed the same error, in a less extreme fashion, by ignoring the drop in consumption caused by higher prices - people wanted to continue to use more energy, but couldn't do so with the same paycheck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Wind, wave and tide make up more than 80% of Scotland's renewable energy. They are considering nuclear as renewable in the 57% figure.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
How much of the energy consumption is wasted on the mining of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that force lots of useless and discarded computation to be performed?
As already pointed out, the 57% number is electricity, not energy. I suspect they burn a lot of natural gas for heat since they have the North Sea fields. Graphs here indicate that about 3/4 comes from wind, about 1/4 from hydro. Other sources are negligible (obviously Scotland is too far north and too cloudy for PV).
is the consumption of energy. We are energy beings. Green energy is a waste of time in a nation (US) so rich in natural gas and coal.
And most of those renewables is hydro....
No, as it turns out, most of those renewables are wind.
Here are some earlier articles that give a bit more information:
http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/wind-power-providing-almost-half-of-scotland-s-energy-supply-1-4023886
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-35160271
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c4ef7ed8-a8c8-11e5-843e-626928909745.html
Actually, thermodynamics tells that ALL the energy is not renewable... entropy and stuff...
To the contrary. The first law of thermodynamics tells us that all energy is conserved. You don't have to ever worry about energy conservation: the laws of physics guarantee it will happen.
Usable energy... now, that's a different case.
That's how many people live in Scotland. For comparison's sake, the State of California in the U.S. has just under 39 million. Therefore, as much as I like the Scots and Scotland, I'm not terribly impressed by half of their energy coming from renewables.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It is too hard to dispute.
IIRC, Denmark produces 110% of it's electricity needs from renewable sources, likely mostly wind. I think they're selling the excess to other nearby countries.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Québec export lot of it energy as well which will go over the 100% mark, but we do buy some which is not in the very cold winter.
One of the reasons for the existence of the SNP is to capture the income from the offshore fields that has been "stolen" by Whitehall. Does this mean they are making progress?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Scotland's electricity comes from the UK National Grid. This is the country that gave the world Gordon Brown with his double counting. The ruling Nationalists are desperate for a positive headline after decades of "it's oor oil" - and look how that worked out. I'd trust an SNP statistic even less than an average statistic.
People like you are a waste in a nation with 350 million people. It's clearly time for Soylent (the movie variety, not the original.)
I was going to say that Quebec must have an excess of hydroelectricity as some is sold to northern New England, USA. I have a friend here in Colorado whose wife is from the Riviere-du-Loupe area, and he tells me his mother-in-law heats her house with electricity because it's cheaper than other energy sources. Whether natural gas is available, I don't know, but if electricity is super cheap, why put in the pipes for something that's not going to be used.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
It's not like it's a hard problem to solve on that scale. All of Quebec combined is half the population of most major US cities. (NY, LA, Chi)
Without some measure of the carbon output this metric is relatively meaningless. Imagine two countries with a goal to reduce their carbon emissions. Both start with nearly all of their electricity from coal.
The first nation replaces half of the coal plants with windmills, hydro electric dams, solar panels, and geothermal. They see their carbon footprint cut in half.
The second nation converts all the coal plants to burn natural gas. They also see their carbon footprint cut in half. At the same time their electricity rates remain the same while the first nation sees their electricity rates nearly double.
Imagine a third nation, they replace their coal plants with nuclear power. They see their electricity rates remain the same, their carbon footprint drop to near zero, and they don't have bird killing windmills and solar panels. By using breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing the amount of nuclear waste produced is the size of a beer can per gigawatt-year.
I see that they were only able to do this by subsidizing wind and solar. Anyone can be carbon free if they have enough money to throw at the problem. Where did this money come from to subsidize the greenwashing? From burning coal I imagine. It's only because of cheap coal that they could afford to do this. What happens when the cheap coal runs out? Unless they plan to build more nuclear power then this is a very temporary victory.
I remember hearing all kinds of kudos for Germany because of their investment in "green" energy but ignoring that they were mining brown coal at incredible rates. Brown coal is exceedingly dirty, and likely wiped out any gains from their wind and solar production. Germany is not alone in this but likely one of the most extreme examples of how going "green" has failed miserably.
Barring some leap in technology for wind and solar to bring down their costs and improving their reliability (both unlikely) we are not going to see any true gains in being "green" without heavy investments in nuclear power. Nuclear power doesn't have to be 100% of the electricity production but it'll likely have to be greater than 50% for a nation to be both "green" and not see energy rates go through the roof. Scotland doesn't get even 20% of their electricity from nuclear now. They have a long way to go.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
No, Denmark is also *only* at about 50% - 60% right now.
But yes, in times of excess production it sells power to its neighbours, like every nation in europe.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
When you have lots of space and a small population.
New Zealand likes to get in on the clean green smug factor too, they recently closed their last coal fired power station down, but that doesnt stop em exporting coal to China to burn. Bump NZ's population by a factor of 10, and see how easy it is to be green then? Same with Canada, larger than the lower 48 states, and a fraction of the population, of course its easy to leave all those natural resources in the ground, like to see you keep them there with a population of of the US (~300 million odd).
More lolnews at 11.
I don't recall which I looked at before, but for both countries the majority of their energy isn't electricity.
Specifically, both are similar in that they use significant energy for heating, whereas some countries don't. Details for each can be found at www.eaia.gov.
Because they are neighbors geographically, they're working within the same parameters as far as the availability of geothermal, hydro, wind, solar, etc. Within that envelope, they can trade reliability and cost for "political greeness" in roughly similar ways.
I say "political greeness" because for example by any objective measure, hydro has done far, far more damage to the environment than nuclear, but hydro is politically considered "green", while nuclear has been labeled "scary" by green activists until recently. Energy policy at a national level is of course political in nature, so it's the political green points that matter, not the actual impact.
We are using oil faster than we are finding new sources
Irrelevant, because at some point LONG before we run out of relatively easy to extract oil, we'll be using mostly solar and nuclear power in various ways (wind energy being an idiotic idea that comes and goes in brief waves).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> Are you seriously suggesting that, after electricity demand dropped 15%, the suppliers did not reduce electricity generation?
No, I'm saying that smashing your car will reduce your C02 footprint. HOWEVER, it will also leave you without transportation, and any judgement about policies should recognize that cost.
Let's try this again. It's about the difference between energy demand (what people need/want/used to have) versus what they got after the market was artificially limited.
Pretend the government shut down all gas stations, all supply of heating oil, and all of the other energy other than electric. So nobody can drive, groceries don't get delivered, people freeze to death, etc. They then announce they've achieved 100% renewable energy.
The claim of "100% renewable energy" would be both completely true and completely false. True, 100% of the energy ACTUALLY SUPPLIED would be from renewables, but that was done by not providing 75% of the energy NEEDED. Do you see the issue there? If I stick you in a cage and give you a piece of paper and claim "that piece of paper will provide all of your nutrition" that's true - you're not getting any other nutrition, but it's not meeting any of your nutritional NEEDS. With me so far?
Obviously any policy which causes people to make due with less should recognize that cost, that distinction between meeting the needs/wants vs cutting people off. In this case, people got 15% less electricity. That should be accounted for if you want to accurately understand the results of the policies.
People have budgets. They get a certain paycheck each week. When electricity rates went up significantly to pay for renewable subsidies, people bought less electricity - 15% less. they spent a little bit money, and for that they got 15% energy. The usage prior to the increase shows the natural consumption - the amount people need/want at natural market rates. After the manipulation, they didn't that much. Renewables (and all other sources) didn't provide for the actual demand, 15% LESS electricity was provided than a few years before.
My state (Maryland, US) is just one nuclear reactor away from 100% renewable.
Scotland has shut down their last coal plant, the largest in Europe during it's heyday.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is really cool and I don't want to diminish the significance of this in general but this is a much simpler endeavor when you're talking about the entire country being the equivalent of a single mid-sized US major city.
liquid oil is getting harder to find and extract over time
Are you sure? It seems like the technology to find and extract said oil is improving quite rapidly.
Also oil companies are sitting on a lot of deposits they already had found but just didn't have the technology to access before, so as the tech improves you have reserves to tap you do't even have to find.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Did you consider that perhaps people can change their habits so that they need less energy? You assume a fixed demand, but as energy prices rise, it becomes more cost effective to spend money on things like home insulation.
Real demand is not a fixed number, it changes in response to price fluctuations. Your scenario where the "natural consumption" is unchanged when prices change is unrealistic.
Also, Ireland?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
> Did you consider that perhaps people can change their habits so that they need less energy?
If I smash your car, you CAN walk, and it'll reduce CO2, so let's do that. Yes, people will find a way to survive a 15%-20% power cut, but ignoring that cost is error. Half of energy usage is transportation, so when energy is less affordable, that actually means people go fewer places - some skip their summer vacation, etc.
You say people can buy more insulation. Okay, let's pretend that doubling all of the insulation on the house would offset half of the 15%-20% energy reduction. At a cost of $5,000 each. Making you pay $5,000 to double the insulation on your house has no effect on you, because you were just going to throw away that $5,000 otherwise, right?
> Also, Ireland?
I'm Scotch Irish, it's all the same to me. :) Seriously, that was a silly error, but completely irrelevant. People in Scotland and Ireland both use transportation, heating, etc. (Ie most of their energy demand is not electricity). Do s/Ireland/Scotland/ and nothing changes.
> In fact the UK government has been insulating people's houses for free, or very low cost.
The people installing the installation don't work for free. The truck driver delivering the installation doesn't work for free. The people making the insulation don't work for free. The inspectors at the insulation plant don't work for free. Guess where $5,000 of extra taxes went.
Moreover, the lady who wrote the thousand -page government requisition for the program doesn't work for free, and neither do all the people involved in navigating the bureaucracy to win the bid for a particular company. Guess where another $3,000 of your taxes went on that program.
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s/installation/insulation/
Maybe you're right, maybe some people did pay $8.00 for an LED to replace a 39 cent bulb.
So you were telling me about why cutting your electricity usage 20% has no costs? Go ahead with that.
from the bodies of the dead that froze to death during the winter with no heat
> Renewables have actually been keeping prices down in the UK. Contrast with nuclear that is forcing prices up.
Somebody lied to you, in two ways. First, comparing them is a bit silly, because they aren't interchangeable, they complement one another. (What's the cost per MWh of solar power on a cloudy day?) More on that in a moment. Second, wind power projects in the UK have cost quite a bit -more- than nuclear. The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change lists nuclear at 80-105 £/MWh, onshore wind at 80 -110, offshore wind 150-210. Unlike onshore, offshore wind is somewhat steady minute-to-minute, varying by the hour and day, though not long-term steady like nuclear - and wind costs twice as much. That's according to the friggin department of climate change.
That all somewhat misses the point, though. Wind is really cheap during a thunderstorm. It's infinitely expensive in the early morning, when the air is still. The amount of power in wind is proportional to the CUBE of the velocity, so a 30 MPH wind has TWENTY SEVEN times as much power as a 10 MPH wind. Windmills need to be built heavy-duty enough to survive the power of a 60-80 MPH storm wind. That's about 1,000 times as much power as a breeze, so the inertia, internal friction etc of the heavy-duty construction means you get no power from a light breeze. That's the nature of wind power - sometimes it's cheap, oftentimes is completely shut off, unavailable. So you use it when you can.
A rational mix is as follows:
nuclear to cover the daily minimum load (the 2AM demand)
wind or in some cases solar for whatever they provide at the moment
natural gas or similar throttleable to make up the difference
* hydro and geothermal are a small part of the base minimum (nuclear) portion, in areas that happen to have the geological features handy.
> Are you seriously suggesting that, after electricity demand dropped 15%, the suppliers did not reduce electricity generation?
No, I'm saying that smashing your car will reduce your C02 footprint. HOWEVER, it will also leave you without transportation, and any judgement about policies should recognize that cost.
Let's try this again. It's about the difference between energy demand (what people need/want/used to have) versus what they got after the market was artificially limited.
Pretend the government shut down all gas stations, all supply of heating oil, and all of the other energy other than electric. So nobody can drive, groceries don't get delivered, people freeze to death, etc. They then announce they've achieved 100% renewable energy.
The claim of "100% renewable energy" would be both completely true and completely false. True, 100% of the energy ACTUALLY SUPPLIED would be from renewables, but that was done by not providing 75% of the energy NEEDED. Do you see the issue there? If I stick you in a cage and give you a piece of paper and claim "that piece of paper will provide all of your nutrition" that's true - you're not getting any other nutrition, but it's not meeting any of your nutritional NEEDS. With me so far?
Obviously any policy which causes people to make due with less should recognize that cost, that distinction between meeting the needs/wants vs cutting people off. In this case, people got 15% less electricity. That should be accounted for if you want to accurately understand the results of the policies.
People have budgets. They get a certain paycheck each week. When electricity rates went up significantly to pay for renewable subsidies, people bought less electricity - 15% less. they spent a little bit money, and for that they got 15% energy. The usage prior to the increase shows the natural consumption - the amount people need/want at natural market rates. After the manipulation, they didn't that much. Renewables (and all other sources) didn't provide for the actual demand, 15% LESS electricity was provided than a few years before.
Depending on your household, you can cut your electricity usage by over 15% just by switching out your light bulbs to LED bulbs, installing suitable insulation, powering off appliances when they are not in use and a few other bits and pieces (shorter showers, turn down your hot water heater, adjust your heating/cooling so they don't need to change the temperature as much in relation to the outside temperature, etc).
He'll build a wall around Scotland tall enough to reduce the wind to near zero. Then he can build his golf courses without looking at those windmills.
> And where did you get those cost figures? Why should we base an argument over figures that you pulled out (being polite here) thin air?
The point is that there is a cost. It's good you're being polite, because one of us thought that products and services appear out of thin air.
$5,000 is about right for attic insulation only in a medium sized house with typical blown insulation, but different buildings will have different costs. Obviously replacing the insulation in walls is quite a bit more expensive, because you have to tear out the drywall. Adding MORE insulation in the exterior walls would often require making the walls thicker, which would be a MAJOR renovation. Window upgrades are a few thousand dollars. Source? I've had this kind of work done. Hit Google for ten seconds to get average costs for whatever type of work you want to look up.
The key point is that you're now thinking about the costs, rather than ignoring the costs, or even actively pretending that it's free.
The comparison is that claim that renovation work is done "for free".
How much of this comes from burning wood pellets or chips?
This is really cool and I don't want to diminish the significance of this in general but this is a much simpler endeavor when you're talking about the entire country being the equivalent of a single mid-sized US major city.
And Scotland is also smaller than most US states, so what?
Scotland has 67 people per square km, the US has 35. It's only difficult if you keep making excuses...
No, it's easy .... when I'm providing a system to provide electricity for 120 million homes vs 2 million homes ...... the materials required, cost, labor, maintenance, in terms of economies of scale are very, very different ... In addition, more physical space doesn't make it easier, more space means more distance to haul the electricity across.
It's like suggesting that laws regarding health coverage or laws regarding gun control that work somewhere like scotland could ever work in the US in the same way ...... you just can't compare any experiment that works in a single US city sized population with something that works across an entire country the size of ours that has more diversity than the whole of europe within it's borders.
I guess it's yet another chicken little AGW deniers' failed predictions, eh?
Scotland alone has enough wind reserves offshore to power the entire UKs primary power consumption, heating included, excepting only transport and non-power replavement uses.
So where is the wind turbine depleted? How strong or corrosive the wind if it melts fucking carbon composites????
No, it's easy .... when I'm providing a system to provide electricity for 120 million homes vs 2 million homes ...... the materials required, cost, labor, maintenance, in terms of economies of scale are very, very different ... In addition, more physical space doesn't make it easier,
Yes exactly, large infrastructure gets easier with scale, especially if you have spare land to put everything. Eg Hong Kong is hard because they have nowhere to put a new power station. Australia is hard because they have no water, and vast distances between population centres. It would be quite easy for a state in the US to implement the same policies as Scotland, and get the same result. Then just times by 50.
more space means more distance to haul the electricity across.
Transmission wires are already there. And even if they weren't, this is the cheapest part of the system.
It's like suggesting that laws regarding health coverage or laws regarding gun control that work somewhere like scotland could ever work in the US in the same way ...... you just can't compare any experiment that works in a single US city sized population with something that works across an entire country the size of ours that has more diversity than the whole of europe within it's borders.
Yet Europe has still has better health care and lower gun violence than the US. As I said, the hardest part is to stop making excuses...