Scotland is known for having recorded the strongest ever gust of wind in the
United Kingdom. The summit of Cairn Gorm – a mountain in the Scottish Highlands –
recorded the country's strongest ever gusts of 150.3 knots or 173 miles per
hour in 1986. This makes Scotland one of the most ideal areas to harness wind
energy, but is simply building more wind turbines the answer to lowering your
energy bill? The Shetland Isles are the northernmost region of the United
Kingdom. In the 1970s huge oil reserves were discovered both east and west of
this rugged landscape, giving the economy a much needed boost and a source
of income other than fishing. As the U.K. looks to phase out fossil fuels and
wean itself off of Russian gas, it's wind energy that is said to boost to the
region's economy, this time around.
Alistair Phillip-Davies is the CEO of SSE one of Europe's biggest energy companies.
This project has been a long time in the making, it's been 15 plus years. So a
huge amount of work has gone into planning it, making sure the turbines
are in the right spaces here to maximize wind
SSE is building 103 turbines and using 257 kilometres of subsea cables to
connect the onshore Viking wind farm to the Great Britain grid, which should
have the capacity to provide energy for half a million homes, including every
home in Shetland.
Shetland is going to be an energy hub going forward. So it actually is a
template that we intend to use elsewhere, in terms of how we expand out
the network.
The turbines turn wind into energy through the aerodynamic force from the
rotor blades. Each of the wind turbine and a wind farm are linked together by
underground cables. These cables then carry the energy to a transformer
substation. From there it's transported to homes, factories, businesses or
schools through the distribution networks of various electricity
companies.
This effectively is the harvesting point for the renewable generation. And from
here, we turn it into direct current, we fire it down cable to the northeast
coast of Scotland, where it connects to our transmission network.
This will be the most productive wind farm in the UK. And that will be the
first time that the U.K. and Shetland have been connected electrically.
But these ambitious goals face challenges. There are reports that green
energy projects with billions of pounds have been put on hold because of a lack
of capacity in the U.K.'s power grid. The country's grid was originally built
to accommodate a small number of fossil fuel power plants. Now they are 1,100
projects waiting to plug into the electricity system. This could delay new
solar and wind sites by 10 to 15 years, undermining renewable energy companies'
ability to attract investment and could threaten the U.K. as target for 100% of
its electricity to be free of carbon emission by 2035.
The grid provides the arterial routes that allow generation both onshore and
offshore and a whole energy mix. Not only will it allow us to supply the
demand down south, but it also increases the security of supply and the
capability of our network that serves our communities.
The United States and several countries in the European Union are planning to
invest hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize their electric grids, in
part to accommodate more renewable energy projects too. For many years, the
U.K. has been expanding its wind energy capabilities with a raft of turbines now
scattered across the country. Between 2009 and 2020, the amount of electricity
generated from wind power in the United Kingdom increased by 715%. Meanwhile,
electricity generation from renewable sources in the U.K. have increased as
the production of oil and coal decreased. Meanwhile, the overall fossil
fuel share of generation dropped from 42% in 2021 to 14.8% in 2022.
We don't want to be importing oil and gas from far flung places that we no
longer want to deal with and where we no longer trust the regimes. Let's get back
to building our own infrastructure, relying on what we've got. And making
sure not only we get it a lot cheaper, but also we've got a lot more security
supply because we're in control of it.
At the start of 2023, the U.K. government outlined proposals to reform
the so called capacity market to prevent electrical blackouts and to encourage
investment in low carbon technologies. The proposals could be the start of an
energy storage boom. The government has even gone on to fund at least five
energy storage projects across the U.K. — part of $40 million allocated for the
country's energy security. The U.K. is experiencing more periods running
entirely on energy produced without burning coal, including a stretch in
2020, lasting 67 days. The government has said that it wants to generate
enough wind energy to be able to power every home in the U.K. by 2030. With
that in mind, a lot more may have to be done to make wind energy a bigger source
of power the very near future.