Scotland faces losing £60bn on wind farms?

[Gillian34787]

This doesn’t appear to be getting the attention or press that the sums involved seem to merit! It’s quite alarming! But I don’t know enough about it, and the only rebuttable I can find is locked.

Has it been challenged in parliament/ is there anyone on here more knowledgeable to give a balanced view if this isn’t, please?

www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/23300089.scotwind-scotland-faces-loss-60bn-new-offshore-wind-farms/

Put your hand up if you’re surprised.

We could’ve driven a really hard bargain and taken MASSIVE fees or granted all Scottish homes “free” energy.

Instead…

Looks like we did disproportionately badly - should get more attention...

I remember when the rights were signed away. I wondered what the fuck the thought process was.
SNP throw away any opportunity to make any real change..

Yep. Wasted opportunity. Again. Wonder qui bono?

What do you expect when the SNP energy minister told the Scottish parliament that there were 19000 turbines on the Scottish hills when in fact there are just over 4000 . Their incompetence knows no bounds .
This is an industry driven by subsidies with most of the profits going overseas .
They aren’t green and are destroying Scottish communities. We are also heading towards producing more energy than we can feasibly store so will be paying enormous restraint payments so they can switched off . It’s a scandal waiting in the wings .

Can someone please explain in layman's terms what's happened here? I found the article hard to understand - I don't have an accountant's/economist's brain! I get the gist that Scotland doesn't seem to be benefitting from the wind farms as much as you would imagine? Anyone care to translate?!

Does anyone have any faith in anything this shower of fuckwits do? It seems to be one massive failure after another.

Quite clearly Westminster's fault. If we had our own fiscal levers yadda yadda yadda. Scotland has the bestest wind in the WORLD and if we were independent we'd all be billionaires exporting our leccy to the rest of Europe, if not the world. Just look at our amazing track record of large scale infrastructure projects like the Edinburgh Trams, the parliament building, the ferries, the dualling of the A9.

What could possibly go wrong??

Sorry I can’t help, thats what I’m after too! I can’t tell if the article is exaggerating massively or if this really has been a massive screw up which should surely prompt an enquiry 🤷🏻‍♀️

It seem very complex doesn't it?

My reading of it is that they had to set a ceiling price when auctioning off the rights.

In all the auctions bar one the ceiling was reached indicating that it was too low and had their been no ceiling would have achieved much higher values.

Auctions of such rights in other countries have also achieved much higher prices.

It's not 100% clear from that article though so I could be wrong.

The low price ceiling it seems keeps electricity units cost lower for the end consumer though. So probably a hard balance to strike.

They also failed to gain commitment to supply chains remaining in Scotland and it seem the jobs associated with this will go overseas.

This might help too:

commonweal.scot/policies/scotwind-one-year-on/

The ScotWind auction of January 2022 has massively undervalued Scotland’s offshore energy resources and placed a low and arbitrary maximum ceiling on the amount that competitors could bid for their development.

― In the year since its announcement, at least three more offshore wind auctions have concluded, two in the USA and one in England.

― All three of these auctions have raised many times more revenue for their respective governments than ScotWind did.

― On a comparative basis, these auctions have raised up to 40 times as much as ScotWind did.

― Had ScotWind raised as much on a per MW basis as New York Bight, Scotland would have raised £16.4 billion in a single payment. Had it matched the performance of the recent English auction, it may have raised up to £28 billion in annual payments across up to a decade.

― Beyond the financial disaster that ScotWind has been, the promises of supply chain protections have not been met. Only a little over a third of the minimum investments committed to ScotWind will take place in Scotland.

― Conditions on these minimum commitments all but guarantee that it would be profitable for companies to break the majority of these commitments.

― Even in the best case Ambition scenario, only around half of ScotWind’s investments will take place in Scotland.

― Recent announcements regarding Scotland’s “Green Freeports” raise the severe risk that at least part ScotWind will be constructed within Freeport Zones and may not be subject to normal levels of tax or protections for workers rights or the environment.

― The Scottish Government continues to dismiss out of hand the idea of and benefits of public ownership of renewable energy despite precedents now set by the Welsh Government on how this can be done within the devolved context and clear published blueprints for how involvement can be scaled up over time.

― The Scottish Government should conduct an inquiry into how it got the ScotWind auction so badly wrong and what steps it will take to redress these errors ahead of the next round of renewables development in Scotland.

Never mind, eh Nicola. Your time is better spent picking fights with Westminster.

So Scotland sold off its sea bed plots for other companies to build windmills but they sold them off too cheap? Is that what's gone on? I thought the King owned the coastal waters round Britain?

I'm not sure what MW means as mentioned in "― Had ScotWind raised as much on a per MW basis as New York Bight, Scotland would have raised £16.4 billion in a single payment"

My brain thinks if Scotland has a lot of 'wind' to be farmed, it should do deals whereby people invest lots of money to help build wind farms in exchange for being able to have a % share of the energy produced - which is sold to consumers via energy companies - also the Scottish Government seeks guarantees that Scottish companies will manufacture all the windmilly 'stuff' and thereby create jobs/money for Scottish engineers, manufacturers, suppliers etc ... And there are conditions that mean Scotland gets to keep some of the power generated for a knock-down rate that it can sell back to the citizens of Scotland. So immediate benefits via the lump sum to the economy; ongoing benefits to the economy via jobs, contracts for manufacturing, maintenance etc ... and economic and ecogical benefits to Scotland by providing oodles of affordable, eco-friendly energy?

I'm taking very little of the above is happening for there to be such condemnation?

I believe it to be a very complex subject matter that has been sensationalised in a badly written article.

The lease costs in the NY Bight auction can’t be compared to what was paid in the ScotWind auction. It’s like comparing the price of a house in Springburn to Kensington.

Ultimately developers need to be able to build the things profitably or they won’t do it. The number of sites awarded in Scotland won’t all be built, they’ve over awarded. The lease costs will be paid regardless. Money for nothing for the government.

There’s everything you need to know about this and the wind farm business on Scotland against Spin which will open your eyes to this lucrative operation
which is all about the developers making vast profits which are not reaped in Scotland but largely overseas .

There are huge and totally obscure subsidy mechanisms at play here too which mean we won’t ever have cheap electricity.

On the eco front Strathclyde University did a study on microplastics thrown into the environment by the turbine blades .( Study is on internet) One of the largest turbines can cast off up to 62 kg of microplastics in a year .Imagine what the big offshore windfarms are shedding into the North Sea which then is ingested by seabirds , whales fish etc etc .
Restraint payments in Scotland for 2020 and 2021 were £350 million pounds .

So Scotland sold off its sea bed plots for other companies to build windmills but they sold them off too cheap? Is that what's gone on? I thought the King owned the coastal waters round Britain?

Not sold. I believe these are 6 year long leases.

Thanks. So leasing for six years? OK.