Scotland on path to 100% green electricity by 2020

Ardrossan wind farm.  Source: Wikipedia

From World Economic Forum:

So far this year, Scotland's wind turbines have produced almost double the amount of wind energy needed to power every household in Scotland, according to WWF.

As WWF explained in the report, between January and July of 2019, Scotland generated 9,831,320 megawatt hours (MWh) of wind energy, as per data recorded by WeatherEnergy. That's enough to power 182 percent of all 4.47 million Scottish homes, or nearly 100 percent of homes in both Scotland and the North of England. The new figures have set a new record for the country's wind power output.

“These are amazing figures, Scotland’s wind energy revolution is clearly continuing to power ahead. Up and down the country, we are all benefitting from cleaner energy and so is the climate," Robin Parker, WWF Scotland's Climate and Energy Policy Manager, said in a statement for WWF.

Alex Wilcox Brooke, Weather Energy Project Manager at Severn Wye Energy Agency, added that these statistics show how reliable wind energy can be. “These figures really highlight the consistency of wind energy in Scotland and why it now plays a major part in the U.K. energy market," Brooke told WWF.

Scotland is pretty forward-thinking when it comes to renewable energy. As detailed on Scotland's government website, the country has a goal of using renewable energy sources to provide 100 percent of Scotland's gross annual electricity by 2020. If Scotland accomplishes this goal, that would mean that beginning next year, Scots will not be using any fossil fuels to generate electricity.

When Scotland set that 2020 target, it also set an interim goal of powering 50 percent of its electricity with renewable energy by 2015.

Since achieving that interim goal in 2015, Scotland has continued to ramp up its dependency on renewable energy. The Independent called the country a "world leader" in renewable energy, and noted that in 2016, 54 percent of Scotland's electricity came from renewables, and in 2017, 68.1 percent came from renewables. And in 2018, 74.6 percent of Scotland's gross electricity came from renewable sources, according to Power Technology.

When a country at first starts to replace fossil fuels with renewables, the percentages seem to mount so slowly.  It's just 2% then 4% then 6%, and fossil fuels remain overwhelmingly important.  The task of getting to 100% seems overwhelming.  But then we reach a tipping point, where suddenly renewables are significant, and not long after that, it is fossil fuels which provide only small percentages of total generation. 

This is because of the effect of compound growth.  If renewables capacity is growing by 20% per annum, even if you start with just 5% of your electricity coming from renewables,  within 10 years it will have reached 30% and within 20, 100%.    The annual growth rate in renewables capacity is the key factor, eventually, even though at the beginning the transitions seems so slow.  Every country should commit to increasing their renewables capacity by 20% per annum.  Even if at the beginning that doesn't lead to big falls in emissions, within a few years, it will.