Scotland Aiming for 100% Clean Energy by 2025

Update: Scotland’s 100% renewable electricity target has now been moved up to 2020.

While the U.S. may aim for a 15% Renewable Energy Standard by 2021, and Northern Ireland has just confirmed a much stronger target of 40% renewable energy by 2020, Scotland is aiming a bit higher. It announced today that it plans to get “at least” 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025. Wow.

“Scotland has unrivalled green energy resources and our new national target to generate 80 percent of electricity needs from renewables by 2020 will be exceeded by delivering current plans for wind, wave and tidal generation,” First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond said this week.

“I’m confident that by 2025 we will produce at least 100 percent of our electricity needs from renewables alone, and together with other sources it will enable us to become a net exporter of clean, green energy.”

Similar to Northern Ireland, Scotland is looking to get a lot of its power from offshore wind, as well as onshore wind power. The country has also been a leader in wave and tidal energy, recently launching the world’s largest tidal turbine, launching a couple of other wave energy devices in the past year, and leading in this alternative energy sector for years.

This announcement comes about one week after Scotland announced that it was aiming to hit 80% renewable electricity by 2020.

Scotland is planning to export a lot of its clean energy to its neighbor to the south, England, which has lagged behind the rest of Europe on clean energy.

Salmond made these announcements today at the beginning of the Scottish Low Carbon Investment conference in Edinburgh.

As I said when writing about Northern Ireland’s ambitious new target, at this point we can only dream of such high targets in the US, unfortunately.

Photo Credit: Wind turbines in Scotland by flickr user marcusjroberts