Scotland temporarily ran entirely on wind power as turbines generated over 200 percent of national electricity demand.

[Swede]

Another good news story.

Scotland temporarily ran entirely on wind power as turbines generated over 200 percent of national electricity demand.

— Trump's 'Noble' Peace Prize (@laboomer68.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T02:21:16.756Z

[walkingman]

1. We could learn a lot from our European friends if we would get our head out of our ass.

[Conjuay]

2. It has NOTHING to do with our heads up our asses.

The billionaires can't profit on wind/solar.
As long as they can keep us on oil, they can charge what they want and tax us for the privilege of using only what they supply.

[yardwork]

6. Both are true.

The billionaires (including Saudi Arabia and the other dictators in the Middle East) need large countries dependent on oil.

The billionaires (including Putin who has personally made an unimaginable amount of money off oil) pay to influence hundreds of millions of voters worldwide wide (notably in the U.S., lately) so that those voters will keep their heads up their asses.

[Emrys]

3. Scotland regularly generates an electricity surplus over its own requirements

Unfortunately, because of the way the UK grid is regulated, that doesn't mean people in Scotland pay less for electricity than those living in the south, so we put up with some of the negative impacts but don't see all the direct benefits.

There is some resistance to the locating of new windfarms, along with the power lines to support them, but nothing like the hysteria Trump's expressed about their defiling the views from his golf courses.

His insane hatred of wind power in the US may be traceable to his humiliating protracted defeat when he challenged the construction of a sea-based wind farm that would be barely visible with the naked eye from his course at Menie on the Aberdeenshire coast:

How Trump's loathing for wind turbines started with a Scottish court battle

"I am the evidence," was the eyebrow-raising comment made by Donald Trump when he appeared before the Scottish Parliament in 2012.

He was speaking as an "expert" witness on green energy targets, describing how he believed wind turbines were damaging tourism in Scotland.

Five years before he first became US president, it was one of his earliest interventions on renewable energy - but since then his opposition to them has grown to become government policy in the world's biggest economy.

He was objecting to 11 turbines which were planned - and ultimately constructed - alongside his Aberdeenshire golf course.
...
Trump battled the plans through the Scottish courts, then appealed to the UK's Supreme Court - but he was unable to stop the "monsters" from going ahead.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo

The UK's Labour government, like other recent UK governments before it, is pressuring Scotland to allow the building of new nuclear power stations as its ageing nuclear plants near decommissioning. The SNP-led government in Holyrood has long opposed this as ecologically perilous and unnecessary given that Scotland already more than meets its own needs. The innumerable problems, delays and vast cost escalations encountered in building the new nuclear power station Hinkley Point C in Somerset in England haven't helped the UK government's case.

Anyone interested in how the loads on the UK electricity grid work can view the proportions from various sources in use in real time at https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

The smaller dials in the second row on the right show the two-way interconnector contributions via a network of cables linking the UK, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and other locations on the Continent. The flows will vary dynamically depending on which source has a surplus at any time and the spot price of electricity from that source.

[NNadir]

4. Decades of these kinds of momentary 100% reports demonstrate...

...precisely why so called "renewable energy" is a useless affectation.

If nothing else they demonstrate why the atmospheric collapse is accelerating since this expensive unsustainable junk is unreliable and capricious.

It's 2026. I've personally been hearing this "percent talk" for decades while observing, almost daily, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste rising faster and faster. We hit, for the first time ever, a daily concentration reading over 433 ppm on Monday at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory. It was under 370 ppm at the dawn of this century.

The enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy" has nothing to do with arresting the use of fossil fuels. In fact it depends on access to fossil fuels. It was, is, and will remain until the last forest burns all about attacking the last best hope of humanity, nuclear power.

[Emrys]

7. This isn't a "momentary" surplus, nor is it unreliable.

Scotland regularly produces a surplus. The reason this was a headline was because it's unusual for the percentage to reach so high, but that will be a trend given the number of new developments under way. Through Scottish Power, I have access to a tariff that guarantees 100% renewable sourcing.

Wind power isn't the only electricity development Scotland's involved in. There have been pioneering installations of tidal flow generators, which can produce predictable and constant baseload energy, along with hydro power, which has a long history in Scotland. Vast numbers of houses now have their own solar power installations, and people can see their significant benefits directly through readouts and in their power bills.

You sound like an ideologue, so it's probably not worth debating with you, but the information's out there if you take off your blinkers.

[NNadir]

9. Nonsense. It isn't rocket science to understand that the wind doesn't blow continuously.

I have a very long history on this website of writing about issues in energy and the environment by appeal to the primary scientific literature. I have been reading on the topic for decades.

I would suggest that an "ideologue" is a person who values belief over knowledge.

It's not "debatable" that the planet is burning nor is it debatable that we saw a concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide measured at over 433 ppm on Monday.

Over decades here I've experienced hundreds of defenders of this reactionary scam - making energy access dependent on the weather when the weather is becoming destabilized- calling chanting "debate." It's not only uninteresting, it's depressing.

The planet is burning. I seldom meet an antinuke who notices this reality.

Facts are not subject to debate.

[AZJonnie]

10. I was just thinking the other day I hadn't seen an NNadir pro-nuke post in awhile

Out of curiosity, is it not possible that, had some sizeable portion of renewable power NOT be deployed world-wide over the past few decades, the 433 ppm measurement would be even higher than that?

I'm confused how the fact that this number is continuing to rise despite these deployments somehow proves that the strategy is not effective? Could renewables not be deployed ENOUGH to stop the upward thrust, but still being HELPFUL in reducing the rate of rise?

At the least, wouldn't you have to KNOW what the number would otherwise be without such deployments, so you have something to compare it to?

Not saying you're wrong, I'm just not seeing how "the number keeps rising" alone proves the strategy is completely useless?

[hunter]

13. Wind power will only prolong our dependence on fossil fuels.

In the long run it will do nothing to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gasses humans eventually dump into our planet's atmosphere.

It's a payday loan, not any kind of solution to the underlying problem.

Like it or not, the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely (which we need to do) is nuclear power.

Check out this map of carbon intensities in Europe:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/12mo/monthly

The renewable energy experiment has been ongoing and the results are not encouraging.

[AZJonnie]

15. Yes I've read many dozens of NNadir's posts over the years, you don't have to get me up to speed

Actually, also a lot of yours on his threads as well , and I don't necessarily disagree with the premises either of you espouse.

But I had a very specific, focused question, one based on a simple "critical thinking" process. If you can answer that specific question, I'd be much obliged. To reiterate, I'm not sure it's logically valid to see that the CO2 numbers continue to rise despite the deployment of some small % of renewables and conclude "therefore, the whole premise of renewables being a helpful part of the mix is wrong-minded".

You'd need to know what this PPM number would be OTHERWISE (i.e. without such deployments) in order to assess whether said deployments were valueless, or perhaps even counter-productive.

Or are my critical-thinking faculties slipping away like so many others in my advancing years?

Also, IMHO, the underlying problem is 8B people, a high % of whom would love to live like a billionaire does. Which I think is, in part, a function of constant messaging and propaganda that tries to convince everyone that their "worth" is tied to "what they own". Or more specifically, "what they can buy"

IMHO, the whole world should've adopted China's erstwhile "1 child policy" about 50 years ago, along with a full-scale commitment to nuclear power. And I think about 1/2 the worlds population dying off is already baked in the cake, barring some miracle like fusion

[hunter]

16. The best ways to halt human population growth are not coercive.

The economic and political empowerment of women, universal access to birth control, and realistic sex education are very effective.

Not coincidentally, these are all things "conservatives" of many religions and political ideologies oppose.

I don't believe a brutal decline of the human population by great suffering and death is "baked in the cake." The solution to the problem is obvious but somehow hard to implement. We just have to agree that every human deserves a comfortable and secure place to live, healthy food, clean water, and basic medical care.

Most of the horrors of the modern world are brought upon us by people who do not believe this.

For various reasons I don't think fusion (excluding that which occurs in the sun) will ever be a viable energy resource for humankind. That's okay, fission works well and we've been building fission power plants for more than seventy years now. If we can halt our population growth and quit regarding one another as "consumers" to the detriment of our physical and mental health, nuclear fission can power our civilization indefinitely, beyond the "seven generation sustainability" many environmentalists talk about. ( As someone interested in evolutionary biology I tend to think in longer time scales. The beginning of the Miocene epoch was yesterday morning. )

If a was formulating a conspiracy theory I might say that "renewable energy" and fusion are being promoted for the purpose of prolonging our dependence on fossil fuels.

[Emrys]

18. Nuclear power will have a similar effect

I'll focus again on Hinkley Point C.

To save me a lot of summarizing and typing to a possibly impervious audience, you can read its history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station

Its development was granted a licence in 2012. Today, after many years, it still isn't built. It's slated to come online by 2030. Anyone who wants to place a bet on that happening needs to read that history.

As preparations ground on, in 2016 it was supposed to cost £18 billion and be activated by 2025. Currently, it's predicted by EDF, its prime investor, to come partially online in 2030, for a cost of £48 billion at current prices.

EDF is a French company, with the Chinese CGN an earlier partner that has backpledalled its involvement considerably since the scheme was first floated.

You might assume, since France has long put pretty much all its eggs in one basket, with about 57 operating reactors accounting for some 70% of its energy generation, so you'd assume they know what they're doing. Well.

One thing about nuclear power plants as we know them is that they require access to large bodies of water for cooling and steam generation. Hence many of them are located on the coast, as is the case with Hinkley.

And what is predicted to happen to sea levels in the mid- to long-term future? If you want to bet that sufficient account has been taken of this, given the "unforeseen" problems that have beset this development over the years, be my guest. There's also the issue of storms, which are widely predicted to become more ferocious and frequent as the century wears on.

Given the number of nuclear plants in France and the country's size, EDF couldn't site all of them on the coast. Many were sited near rivers to provide the water supply needed.

Maybe the assumption was that these would always flow and provide sufficiently cool water for operations.

That assumption has begun to unravel in recent years:

Low Water, High Water Temps Force French Nuclear Plants to Cut Output Despite Rising Demand

Declining water levels in French rivers have revealed a key weakness in relying on nuclear power to supply clean energy in a climate emergency— nuclear reactors need to cut output when climate change lowers water levels and raises water temperatures, even as energy demand rises.

“While a lot of the nuclear public relations relates to nuclear as a sort of saviour of climate change, unfortunately, the reverse is true,” Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group and a senior academic at the University of Sussex, told Ankara, Türkiye-based Anadolu Ajansi.

“Nuclear will be a significant and early climate casualty.”

The interplay of climate change, water, and nuclear power is fairly straightforward. Climate change increases the occurrence of both heat waves and droughts, which lower water levels and raise demand for energy to power cooling appliances. Nuclear power plants rely on access to freshwater to cool reactors. If there is not enough freshwater for cooling, or that water is too warm, the nuclear plant needs to scale back, even as consumers crank up their air conditioners.

Several nuclear generating plants in Europe this year have already reduced output or shut down because water sources are too shallow or too hot, including nearly all of France’s 18 nuclear facilities, says Anadolu Ajansi.

https://www.theenergymix.com/low-water-high-water-temps-force-french-nuclear-plants-to-cut-output-despite-rising-demand/

I'm not about to try to teach a DUer about irony, but there it is.

This raises again what I posted about earlier - about the opportunity cost. Hinkley has been very expensive and has taken up a lot of time and engineering and political energy, but has yet to produce a glimmer of electricity. And its carbon footprint has been vast.

In that time, how many renewable research projects and actual installations could have been fielded for that outlay?

[Emrys]

12. Nonsense yourself. I think you fit very well the description of an ideologue

You seem to assume you're the only person around who has dwelt on these issues and researched them. In my case, I've also lived with them for many years in real life, not just reading papers, and my concern for climate change is very real and constant.

The real scam is nuclear power, for very many reasons I won't bother rehearsing here because as I first observed and you've yet again proven, there's little or no point debating you, but Hinkley Point is a prime example.

Primarily, it's a cuckoo in the nest. If all the resources and time that have been ploughed into that ridiculous development had gone into renewables research, deployment and investment, the UK might have its own indigenous companies producing turbines and other facilities, rather than relying on foreign investments which inevitably take the bulk of the profits away from these islands.

Wind and other renewables have a vital role to play as a mix of sources. Nobody credible is suggesting that any country place its sole reliance on wind, that's a ridiculous and historically Trumpesque straw person. The wind may not blow constantly, but if you lived in Scotland, you'd know it blows pretty damn regularly, and will increasingly do so as climate change takes a greater hold.

The prime time when wind falls down is during periods of winter blocking highs and cold weather accompanying prolonged periods of calm. That's where the mix comes in, along with interconnectors to locations which aren't subject to the same weather conditions.

Every nuclear power station must have a rapidly deployed backup in case it goes offline and unbalances the grid. That backup, in the UK at least, comes from dormant gas-powered stations that can be fired up more or less instantly. So nuclear also relies on other sources of power during its operational life.

[hunter]

17. Could it be that's what the fossil fuel industry wants you to think?

[Emrys]

19. I don't know why you think that.

The fossil fuel lobby's prime target for opposition has long been renewable energy, from at least the Bush I years.

Nuclear power is just another highly centralized cash cow that won't deliver on its promises (see my reply to someone else above).

[Torchlight]

5. Human ingenuity sometimes (not often, but sometimes)

overcomes human stubbornness and self-absorption. I think this is one of those instances.

[DoBW]

8. really good

I'm blown away

[artemisia1]

11. They will need to be bombed over this and their regime changed. Too threatening to Big Oil. (SARCASM).

[Kid Berwyn]

14. Gee. Who WOULDN'T want that for the USA and planet earth?

Notice Big Oil's very own Big Bonehead behind Bonesaw and the Boss.