Talk:Renewable energy in Scotland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Renewable energy in Scotland has been listed as a good article under the good-article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a review.

	Renewable energy in Scotland is within the scope of WikiProject Scotland, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Scotland and Scotland-related topics. If you would like to participate, visit the project page.
A	This article has been rated as A-Class on the quality scale.
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the importance scale.
Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.
WikiProject Scotland To-do: edit  Template:Scotland opentask

An entry from Renewable energy in Scotland appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 21 February 2007.

[edit] Notes on creation of page

As Monbiot (2006) points out, a major problem with this subject matter is that apparently prestigious sources regularly provide well-researched information that blatantly contradicts the findings of similar organisations. Some for example, believe that tidal power's contribution to energy production is likely to be trivial.

I have attempted to provide as coherent a picture as possible in the circumstances by, for example, sticking mostly to predictions of maximum output in GW. Using energy productions in TWh might be more useful in some ways but would tend to obscure the underlying assumptions unless every reference included a measure for maximum output, capacity factor and assumed production, which might prove cumbersome.

There seems little doubt that the subject matter will continue to attract public attention for some years to come, and best guesses and assumptions will be replaced with something more akin to hard facts. I can only hope that future editors will attempt to maintain the coherence of the article rather than simply alter numbers using a variety of different measures as new publications come to light. Ben MacDui (Talk) 15:37, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Comments

Interesting article. There were some clear problems and slight naivity with the biogas section which I have expanded. A waste-to-energy plant in this contect is an incinerator. It still produces CO2 through the combustion of the biological material. In addition to this it combusts plastic (originating from fossil fuels). Recent EU reports (Working Group on Waste Prevention and Recycling ENV/EPOC/WGWPR(2005)4/FINAL 02.02.07) have highlighted an incineration facility has a similar carbon footprint to leaving biological waste to degrade in landfill, once the overall carbon costs of construction have been taken into consideration.

The facility on Lerwick is better than most on some counts as it recovers heat for a district heating scheme, off setting other energy costs, however the bigger picture must be considered.Alex 15:55, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Many thanks for this. Ben MacDui (Talk) 21:19, 23 February 2007 (UTC)