Scotland has enormous reserves of various types of energy. Which sources should we exploit and why?

Scotland’s resources are so vast that they far outstrip our own reasonable demands. Industrial estimates put Scotland’s total renewable electricity potential alone to be some five times greater than our domestic needs. Instead, we need to think about the kind of country we would be building around those resources.

We could leave our energy potential in the hands of others. We could see the last of the North Sea sucked dry with no plan of how to replace the jobs and industries currently relying on that resource. When the oil companies move on, what happens to the workers they leave behind?
We could buy our renewable hardware from the lowest bidder. German and Chinese companies could deliver the wind turbines owned by multinational corporations which take their profits from your utility bill.
We could allow ourselves to be utterly exploited by companies building the new generation of nuclear plants. I cannot justify the government allowing these companies to charge not less than double the current electricity rate as a pre-condition of merely building these plants when there are better ways already coming online. The extortionate profits from those plants will be channelled into public services…in France and China. Nationalised electricity companies are, apparently, only for “foreign” countries.

We could be content to allow very, very rich people with intimate links to the Westminster Government to frack shale gas out from under your house without your permission and with very limited recourse if things go wrong. If you have not seen the story of fracking in America laid out by Josh Fox’s documentary Gasland then please seek it out. Frankly, it scared me.

Or perhaps there is another way.
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