Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and sprawls through the northern third of the island of Great Britain. It shares borders with England to the south, but otherwise is surrounded by oceans and seas. Scotland also holds a proud distinction — its third-largest city Aberdeen on the north east coast of the country has been termed as the European oil capital due to the fact that Scotland’s territorial waters on the north Atlantic and the North Sea hold the highest reserve of crude oil in the European Union.
The country sits on an area of about 78,000 square kilometres, slightly less than the UAE’s land area of almost 84,000 sqkms. With a population of approximately 5.3 million and a per capita income from all that oil oozing around them standing at about $45,000 (Dh165,510), the Scots are in a higher financial bracket than the Saudis as per the figures gleaned from online sources. Wikipedia slots the nominal per capita income for Saudis to around $21,000 — a figure that is less than half of that of the Scots.
Although awash with oil resources, the ever-practical Scots are planning for a time ahead. Known for being proverbially kind, the Scots are also known for being penny-wise and logical. So it came as no surprise that the Scots had been planning for decades to harness another key resource available to them, which were the high winds raging across foaming oceans and seas to their shores. They invested heavily in wind turbines to increase power generation and leave more of that precious oil for sale to others.
A week ago, they achieved the merit of supplying all the power the country needed for a day when wind speeds reached 115 miles per hour (185 kilometres per hour) carrying gusts of more than 60mph through towns in the north. According to data provided by WeatherEnergy, an information service that uses real weather data, turbines in Scotland provided ‘39,545 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity to the national grid on Sunday, while the country’s total power consumption for homes, businesses and industries was 37,202MWh. Meaning, that wind power generates 106 per cent of Scotland’s electricity needs’.
Lang Banks, the Scottish director for WWF — the world’s leading independent conservation organisation — said: “While Sunday’s weather caused disruption for many people, it also proved to be a good day for wind-power output, with wind turbines alone providing the equivalent of all Scotland’s total electricity needs. This major moment was made possible thanks in part to many years of political support, which means that across the year, now renewables contribute well over half of our electricity needs.”
He cautioned that “if we want to ensure we reap the many benefits of becoming a low-carbon economy, we need to see that this political support for renewables continue. We also need the Scottish government’s forthcoming energy strategy to set a goal of securing half of all our energy from renewables by 2030. While it’s not that this hasn’t happened in the past, it’s certainly the first time since we began monitoring data in 2015 that we’ve had all the relevant information to be able to confirm it. However, on the path to a fully renewable future, this certainly marks a significant milestone”.
Hats off to the Scots. Here they are sitting around more oil than they know what to do with and yet they are thinking of the future, a future that may one day not include the luxury of a depleted resource. Using money obtained through the sale of their precious oil resources, they have invested in an alternative form of energy-supplying mechanism and a far cleaner and greener source.
In the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), while we are blessed with oil reserves, we are not as fortunate as the Scots with wind power. However, we do have an unmatched source of energy that is constant all year round and that is solar power. The sun shines on almost every day of the year in this part of the world and the energy gleaned from this natural source can be tremendous. The GCC countries need to harness such an unrestrained and potential source of clean energy on a national scale.
Instead, we have been using our own oil resources to fuel our energy needs, so much so that in some GCC countries, more than half of the oil resources pumped out are going to satisfy the growing appetites for more domestic consumption. How long before the last drop is pumped out, and then what? It may not happen during my lifetime, but if we do not seriously formulate some plans on a national level now to develop solar energy and quickly, we will have missed the bus.
Let us take a page from the Scots and do it their way.
Tariq A. Al Maeena is a Saudi socio-political commentator. He lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@talmaeena.