Scotland leading the way with green energy
Despite the recent headlines about their political parties not having the best time of it, Scotland is leading the charge when it comes to the march towards green energy.
While onshore wind farms are still effectively banned in England many of the projects in Scotland have been powering ahead and production is already making a change to the face of renewable energy north of the border.
Seagreen is Scotland’s largest wind farm, as well as being the world’s deepest wind farm.
The wind turbines for the energy producer are located offshore and are attached to the seabed, which is a staggering 58 metres below the sea.
This is an incredible achievement of human engineering and it is also a clear win for Scotland in terms of in- vestment in green energy and creating skilled jobs in new industries.
This is particularly important as the North sea oil and gas reserves run out.
While Seagreen is a fixed bottom wind farm – which means that it is attached to the bottom of the ocean, Green Volt is a proposed new windfarm that will be floating on the sea.
The project will be in Peterhead in Aberdeenshire and it’ll consist of a massive 35 wind turbines which it will generate 560MW of renewable energy and yield over three billion pounds in investment.
While 35 might not sound like a huge number of turbines, in the context of floating wind farms, it really is.
The next biggest floating offshore wind farm is in Norway and that windfarm has just 11 wind turbines.
Nicol Stephen, the chief executive of Flotation Energy, said: "This multibillion-pound development can now move forward confidently, creating hundreds of local jobs and proving the UK and Scottish supply chain is ready to deliver commercial scale floating projects."
Floating wind farms are amazing new technology because they can be deployed where the sea bed is too deep to attach turbines, which will open up a lot more locations to enjoy the benefits of green electricity.
As they don’t need to be anchored onto the sea bed they’re a great option for loads of other potential sites both around UK shores and across the world too.
The Green Volt project is primarily being built to power oil and gas rigs so that’s not ideal from a climate perspective.
However, Scotland is still planning to reach net zero by 2045 so there will be more wind farms like Seagreen in the future and these could make a huge difference to where consumer energy comes from.