Charles Smith gave an overview of the likely make-up of Scotland’s future energy mix in light of the Scottish Government’s current thinking on a Scottish Renewables Strategy.   In particular, in discussing the Scottish and UK governments' targets for renewables, Charles highlighted the importance of maintaining a focus on renewable energy for heat and transport as well as for electricity.  He identified a number of incentives and potential barriers to the generation of increased levels of renewable energy and picked out carbon capture and storage and combined heat and power schemes as worthy of further investment.

In response, David Wilson of the Scottish Government said that not only could Scotland meet its own electricity demand from renewables, we could have more than 10 Gigawatts of installed capacity by 2020, and in the future be supplying significant amounts of power to our UK and European neighbours from wind, wave and tidal power.  David also reinforced the potential of carbon capture and highlighted Scotland’s significant coal reserves.

A number of contributions were made questioning the Scottish Government’s anti-nuclear policy, with consensus that this was a risky stance given the uncertainty over the development of new technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration.

It was pointed out that the only objective analysis of the Scottish Government’s renewable energy targets had said that we could hit 50 per cent of electricity from renewable sources by 2020, but that nuclear should remain an option in the longer term due to the need to replace ageing baseload capacity.

Finally, the Chair asked for a show of hands and there was almost unanimous support for a new generation of nuclear generation in Scotland.