Up to £2bn will be invested by ScottishPower in the UK in 2019, as the company transitions from fossil fuels to wind power, battery storage and EV charging.
It is claimed that a total of £6bn will be spent between 2018 and 2022, with 40 per cent invested in new wind generation, 42 per cent going towards smart networks, and 15 per cent on new products and services for its customers. This will include a new public EV charging business, with installations set to get underway in 2019. There are also plans for a 50MW battery storage facility at ScottishPower’s Whitelee site, home to the UK’s largest onshore windfarm.
The company – a subsidiary of Spanish utility giant Iberdrola – sold its thermal and hydro generation assets to Drax in October 2018. Its generation now comes exclusively via wind power, though ScottishPower’s retail customers continue to get a mix of green and non-green energy, with gas and coal-fired power bought from other sources.
“Consumers want and need access to reliable, clean and affordable energy,” said ScottishPower CEO, Keith Anderson. “That is what ScottishPower is focused on delivering and as long as government climate change commitments stay firm, with sensible policies to support them, this investment will continue.
“Now that we have sold our gas power stations our growth plans are about cleaner and smarter power that will help the UK to decarbonise faster and we have set out the part we will play in the transition to electrify the economy where it matters most now – in transport and in heating.”
According to ScottishPower, it has plans to develop a 1GW pipeline of onshore wind projects by 2025. Despite being the cheapest form of renewable generation and competitive with gas-fired thermal plants, onshore wind was effectively banned in 2015 as David Cameron’s government cut subsidies for the technology. But recent government policy has been less restrictive and ScottishPower is now staking its future on a combination of onshore and offshore wind, backed up by better grid technology and EV infrastructure.
Alongside new onshore investment, the company is continuing construction at its East Anglia ONE offshore windfarm located 43km off the Suffolk coast. The £2.5bn project will see 102 Siemens Gamesa turbines deployed, each with a capacity of 7MW. Energy generated at the site could potentially power the equivalent of more than 630,000 homes annually.
ScottishPower has also gained planning consent for East Anglia THREE windfarm for up to 1,200MW and planning consultations on the company’s next two large offshore windfarms in the East Anglia zone have begun. If consents are granted, it is anticipated that East Anglia TWO will commence construction in 2024 and East Anglia ONE North will commence construction in 2025.
Nice to see Scottish Power are committed to clean energy and are prepared to invest in the future.
They will be rewarded with an expanding customer base looking for environmentally sound solutions.
“There are also plans for a 50MW battery storage facility”? This is meaningless and typical of the sloppy pronouncements of those involved in green energy. Are they talking of 50MW/hours or perhaps 50MW/mins (more likely). With only about 1% of our total energy requirement coming from renewables transition to non-fossil energy will remain a dream until safe and affordable fission or (better) fusion power becomes available..
With respect, Bill your post comes across as a typical sloppy anti-renewables response, whatever the agenda. I am not sure what the UK’s total energy requirement is, but my understanding is that nearly 28% of our total electricity production in 2017 was from renewable sources (mixed). Since the article is clearly referring to electricity generation maybe comparisons should relate to that form of energy?
I think this is excellent news.
Hi Larry. The government plan is to replace all fossil fuels with renewably generated electricity. Contrary to your allegation, I am not anti-renewable. I have spent years looking at and investing in these technologies but always come up with the same answer – without fossil fuels we are stuffed (for the moment) until alternative base-load generators come on stream (fission or (better) fusion).
Renewables will never be able to support our living standards unless (and it is hugely unlikely) a new technology in battery or energy storage can give us GW/weeks of capacity.
I love renewables where they are relevant, I burn logs from my own land, I insulate, I have replaced all lighting with LEDs and would love to have an electric car if that were practical.
We need a logical and informed debate.
Hi Bill, thank you for your reply and clarification of your own commitment to renewables / energy saving. I agree; with the lions share of electricity generation still coming from fossil fuel consumption it would be disastrous to be deprived of it in the short term but hopefully with a phased transition over time and a reduction in power consumption through improvements in energy efficiency we can keep the lights on. Where our government’s concerned though, the ‘plan’ does seem to rely too much on luck and a following wind – pun intended – with the elephant in the room being the proposed transition to electric vehicles.
This does seem to be a marketing article.
The 50MW battery storage is vague to the point of meaningless; is it for peak lopping, load following or storage for those winter days of low insolation and when the wind drops?
Or is there someone else who carries the can for baseload?
On second thoughts perhaps this one is for the politicians …”could potentially power the equivalent of more than 630,000 homes annually.” – neglecting the technology to actually deliver it when needed – rather than when scottish power want it.
Lets assume 50MW for one hour. Not a great deal of use.
The wind drops and we have to burn fossils. That won’t make us clean energy users.
The wind blows hard in Scotland leaving English and Welsh consumers paying Scottish wind farms not to produce. I don’t think that goes down very well.
Excluding nuclear options, I think we should be talking equally enthusiastically about using all spare energy from wind to pump water up to mountain reservoirs. The water can then be used to drive balancing turbines as required.
“Potentially power 630,000 homes.” It’s a pity we can’t ask a 17th century sailor how likely that would be.
Hi Robert, if you look at the amount of pump storage required then this doesn’t really look like a feasible option. There is a very good analysis in a book called “Sustainability Without the Hot Air” – google it. The relevant info is here http://withouthotair.com/c26/page_190.shtml . I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in renewable energy / sustainability as there is quite a lot of misleading info out there. We could do with as much factual information as possible.
I should have mentioned that you can download a pdf of the book for free at http://withouthotair.com/ – very green. It’s a long read but also a lot of good detail.
If the battery is located by the windfarm then the transmission losses will come from the battery capacity when the power is needed in a city. Would it not be sensible to put the battery by the city?
What is the useful maximum transmission distance at 50Hz AC? I read it was 50 miles once.
If DC transmission is used, then that is a different story, but also a different cost.
As noted by others, a battery storage is primarily about kWh or MJ stored not the power that can be drawn. Generally battery storage in single units is very small, say 50 kWh for an EV battery pack.
Suggest that in future storage should be quoted in kWh.
I was surprised to read recently that climste change predictions made for windfarms in the uk, were based on a very small number of actual wind turbines for each installation. The article went on to say that there would be a definite effect on weather patterns for small numbers of turbines per windfarm but that predictions for the effect of large installations was not
yet available. I would be interested to know whether that information is yet available as Scotland appears to be confident in its choice of massive windfarm installations for its future energy requirements.