Earth watch: Scotland just powered an entire day using just the breeze
Scotland set a record of sorts last week when its wind turbines generated a bit more than all the electricity the country needed for a day. The windy northernmost UK country can generate anywhere up to about half of its energy needs from a renewable source on a normal day.
As a land of mountainous wilderness and deep valleys, Scotland might be fortunate in its low-cost onshore wind energy attributes. In fact, on that particular day, its Met office had issued a wind warning as gusts topped 185 kmph on top of the mountains and blew at around 100 kmph in northern towns. The strong winds allowed Scotland to generate 106 per cent of its electricity needs that day.
The aesthetics of wind farms have been derided for the ugliness of the rotor blades moving around thousands of turbines across picturesque landscapes in some kind of Don Quixote-like fantasy, but the environmentalists are not complaining now.
Before we jump the gun on this environmental issue, it must be remembered that it was a Sunday on which this record production out of wind energy took place. Even so, the point to be taken is there is a future for renewable energy which man must pursue and Scotland is about the biggest power consumer to have thus far showed the efficacy of energy production from an abundant source.
A low carbon economy is not going to be easy to achieve. It might be way too expensive for emerging economies even in the face of decreasing production costs. However, the point is the tapping of renewable sources must be made with sustained efforts. For instance, even in the variable climate of India, there are periods, particularly during the monsoons, when wind energy is plentiful in pockets. But India seems to be failing to tap into the high wind season.
Ambitious as the plans of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are in upping wind and solar modules, the parlous state of finances of electricity boards are such that producers hardly get payments in time for the power they generate from these eco-friendly sources.
Trillions of dollars may be needed for China and India to reduce their carbon emissions over time, but national financial steps cannot be so tenderly taken as to frighten off the private sector, which have a stake in exploiting renewable energy sources to offset its own power needs in mega cities. The problem with both photovoltaic panels and wind is they cannot power a city on their own as the Sun shines only for a part of a 24-hour day and the high wind can be seasonal. But experiments are already being carried out using Sun, salt and glass in the Nevada desert to store energy in a molten-salt storage inside a tower that seems to leap straight out of science fiction. The concentrated solar power heats the salt, which can then turn turbines to generate electricity any time of the day.
Another breakthrough is being seen in a new solar cell that is photosynthetic rather than photovoltaic and like the leaves of plants converts carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel using only sunlight for energy. These are exciting times for scientists but what man needs most is the political will to back these initiatives.
