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The resources that make living in scotland quite hard on those the wind in the wave of the tides actually can be turned to our advantage whether you’re dealing with a wind platform or an oil platform doesn’t really make any differences the advantage of wind energy is that you’ve got an infinite resource so it’s always going to be here scotland has been a fossil
Fuel powerhouse for decades but the oil and gas fields of the north sea are aging and even with recent discoveries the country knows that its oil age is already beginning to come to an end scottish politicians see a future for the country as a world-leading testbed for renewable power and just off the coast from the oil industry capital aberdeen developers
Are pioneering a new way of extracting energy from the north sea floating wind turbines unlike standard offshore wind turbines which use masts built onto the seabed these are placed on floating platforms tethered with moorings making them easier to install and allowing them to be deployed in much deeper waters if they can be made commercially viable floating
Turbines would open up vast coastal areas around the world to offshore wind within 10 or 20 years they will reach a time where floating will be the dominant source of wind power rather than fixed particularly here in aberdeen we have many skills that are designed to learn and operate offshore wind which we can transfer from oil and gas when you got sees like
The narsee which you can exploit then you will use fixed structures but most of the world will move and use floating systems the drive for a leading role in new renewables technology is helped by scotland’s enthusiastic adoption of wind power in october 2018 output from scottish onshore wind farms averaged the equivalent of a record ninety-eight percent of the
Country’s electricity demand the scottish government has some of the world’s most ambitious greenhouse gas targets it aims to raise the proportion of total energy used that comes from renewable sources to at least 50% by 2030 scotland is also a focus of international efforts to tap the power of the tides underwater turbines are already generating electricity
From the powerful currents around the northern archipelago of orkney it’s still early days for the technology but if it can be demonstrated to be commercially viable there are huge reserves of energy to be harvested from the world’s oceans and as in wind some proponents are backing a new fluting approach the tidal energy is a predictable it’s constant and it’s
A around the world as is very very interesting because it’s a difference renewable energies okay it’s the difference of the wind energy or a solar we have a boat is the first may platform or deck we have amassed 30 metres there and in the bottom we have a nutshell we still have two rotors and we works a control rotary system okay it’s like to install a wind
Power generator on the water and put in the ways of the the power generated wind power generator about we joined a to storage sectors in europe a wind energy sector another subject scottish company orbital marine power built a twin turbine floating tidal stream machine that generated a record three gigawatt hours of renewable electricity in its first year if
You look at the wind industry the long term socio-economic benefits of supply chain opportunities went to the markets that were at the forefront an early stage because you will grow indigenous suppliers and market chain it’s a supply chain that will invest and entrench in the domestic market and that’s what we’ve been trying to create here if we have no market
It’s very hard for those investments to take place and if those markets certainly have challenged and taken elsewhere for example canada or france or southeast asia then the supply chain and the industrial opportunities will move with them there are lessons here from what these past in the 1980s the uk was at the cutting edge of renewable technologies on burger
Hill stood one of the world’s largest experimental wind turbines in the decades after wind farms across orkney scotland in the world proved that wind technology is viable but uk government attention it shifted away from wind and british companies were eclipsed by rivals elsewhere machines you seen around us today these are generally german or danish built and
The technology is now proven and it works and we’re at the stage where we can build a commercial wind farm that had run for 20 years and really that’s where we should be with british technology but it just didn’t work that way neel kamal the watney’s european marine energy center says the scottish government strongly supports development of tidal and wave power
Technologies but he worries about a lack of uk government incentives for their deployment at commercial scale to get this technology to really get going what we need to do is recognize that we’ve got technology that’s working we’ve got the resources that are here we’ve got the ability we’ve got the skills what we’re actually missing is that tiny little bit of
Push right at the start you know the effectively that bit we get the bobsleigh going the push to really hard get down the snow and it will then take off at the end of the day we’re all going to suffer from the effects of climate change if we don’t sort this out we all need to find a way to make the solution work the development of north sea fuels helped make
Scottish companies global players in the oil services sector showing how a country can use its natural resources and an early lead in mastering new technologies to establish a lasting industrial advantage but repeating the trick with renewable technologies such as floating wind and tidal power will not be easy
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Power ahead: Scotland's pioneering renewables role By Financial Times