Canny Scots Show We Can!
... transition fast enough to renewable energy.
In my last post I questioned a doomsday prediction that we’d never be able to transition to a clean economy fast enough to meet increasing demands.
Here’s why the giver-upper is wrong.
He used a plot that suggested that in the years ahead, we’d need to commission an extra 2.2 PWhr per year (i.e., 2.2 x 10^15 Whr/year) just to keep up with increasing demand. As I explained in my previous post, less will be needed in reality because of increased efficiencies and a reducing rate of population increase in the years ahead.
At the time I didn’t have any numbers at my fingertips to back up my claim that the transition should be doable. But the canny Scots have just shown us that even that overambitious target is achievable.
In 2020, Scotland’s energy usage could almost entirely be met from their own renewable sources. They had increased - mainly from new wind and hydro sources - by 1.9 TWhr (i.e., 1.9 x 10^12 Whr/year) compared with the previous year. In doing so, the energy consumption from renewables increased from 90.1 percent of their total in 2019 to 98.6 percent in 2020. I’d be surprised if they haven’t already achieved their legally mandated 100 percent target by now.
How does that increase compare with the giver-upper’s “unattainable” target?
Well, pretty favourably, it turns out. With Scotland’s population of 5.5 million, compared with a global population of 8 billion, the country represents about 0.07 percent of the world’s population. Or, put another way, the world’s population exceeds Scotland’s by a factor of around 1450. If you scale up Scotland’s energy transition to renewables last year by that factor, it comes to 2.8 PWhr per year (i.e., 1450 x 1.9 x10^12 = 2.8 x 10^15 Whr/yr), showing that if the global rate was the same as Scotland’s, new renewables would have comfortably exceeded even that inflated target of 2.2 PWhr/yr. If Scotland can already achieve the target while the renewable energy sector is still in its infancy, it will become eminently doable as the industry matures and fossil fuels die.
Not quite a doddle. Far from it. Of course it will be harder if all countries are trying to do it at the same time. And there’s still that annoyingly large backlog of fossil fuel sources to be mothballed. But it looks like we have a real chance of success!
Good on you Scotland. Keep up the good work! I’m proud to be a McKenzie!
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