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Douglas,
You still don’t get it do you, in your third paragraph you state that OFGEN is now charged with the security of supply, then you end up with should we not build a gas power station for when the wind does not blow.
Did you not notice that there is a planning application in process to turn Cockenzie Power Station from a coal burner into a gas burner?
Now having burnt off all the Gas in the North Sea because Great Britain had no storage capacity, so we are now a net importer of gas and now struggling to build storage(too late) where pray tell is the security of supply when we have to import gas a once only use product?
As things stand should there be a gas fired power station built on the London Olympic site when the games are over and the white elephants that are being built at a cost of some £30 billion that would improve the security of supply for London who at this time are importing from France, Northern Ireland, the North of England and Scotland the grand total of 7496 Mw, now that is security of supply but of course these suppliers are paying £24.00 per Mw simply to supply to the National Grid so that the South of England can be paid a subsidy of £6.oo per Mw that they consume.

An 80% level is absolutely ludicrous, since salter's ducks were conceived no wave or tidal schemes have produced 1mw of power in a commercial manner! Wind power provides nothing if it can not be stored, back up power will always be necessary. With both spain and Danemark both re-evaluating their commitment to re-newables why do we have the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ gullibly swallowing a press release from a vested interest? If we have more energy price hikes to cover this nonsense, people in fuel poverty will die! whatever happened to investigative journalism. This is nothing short of appalling..

Why is so much money being squandered on windmills and wave machines which are inefficient and short lived ? One nuclear power station would provide all the electricity the next twenty years building of renewables is capable of providing , with some left over. Scotland also , is sitting on a mountain of coal, and surely it is not beyond the wit of our much vaunted scientific community to find a way of reducing the "harmful " output from coal fired power stations. It seems the "green " or fashionable lobby has convinced those in authority that only their way can be adopted, however idiotic it is. The theory seems to be that whatever it costs and however useless the system is, the consumer will have no option but to foot the bill whether they like it or not.

The impact on the trade deficit is huge because almost none of this kit is being manufactured in the UK let alone Scotland. R&D funding for renewables technology is lower here than amongst any of our main competitors and our glorious financial institutions are failing to invest and develop the industry.

As a consequence the predictions of the numbers of jobs this industry will create are absolute nonsense.

The move to renewable electricity is dictated be necessity. There is growing evidence that the production of all conventional fossil fuels are hitting hard constraints.

In oil production - this is termed peak oil - where production peaks and enters decline once about half the resource has been used. There have been numerous reports about an imminent peak in world oil production (UK Energy Research Centre, University of Kuwait and the Kuwait Oil Company - peak in 2014, UK Industry Task Force on Peak Oil and Energy Security, US military - potential large oil shortfall by 2015, University of Oxford paper by Sir David King et al, Lloyds of London and Chatham House, German military etc).

In coal production the situation is similar. A number of reports are predicting a decline in coal production in the first half of this century (e.g. the Energy Watch Group). The peak in UK production was 1913 - nearly a century ago. A paper by Patzek and Croft in the journal Energy last month put the peak of world coal production in 2011. Professor David Rutledge from Caltech gave a talk in Edinburgh this week about coal resources and climate change (see for presentation, video and raw data). Rutledge maintains that the IPCC scenarios for climate change are overdone because we don't have the economically recoverable fossil fuels (he concentrates on coal) that the IPCC assume and implies a near term peak in world coal production.

The situation is similar for conventional natural gas. And there are 40 years supply of uranium left at the current rates of usage. Fewer years if the world nuclear electricity generating capacity is expanded.

Of course, this is rather inconvenient from a business as usual perspective. We have no alternative than to transition to renewable resources which tend to be diffuse and intermittent. So we have to be a lot more efficient in how we use energy. And there are some tremendous things we can do to be more efficient - we just need to get on with it.

That's the real news.