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“The REF is not your average renewables group”
The UK’s active renewable energy lobby is no stranger to attacking the government’s energy policy, offering increasingly blistering retorts to each political move.
But in a refreshing change of pace this week, renewables associations turned on each other while the government made the final tweaks to its energy policy reset and upcoming spending review report.
The Renewable Energy Foundation is not your average renewables group. Although the REF claims to “encourage informed debate”, in practice this manifests as taking shots at an industry you might expect it to represent.
This week the REF hit out at the wind industry by revealing data showing that Scottish windfarms contributed a mere 1.3 per cent of the UK’s electricity on 4 November. The dismal display raises serious concerns about Alex Salmond’s claim that the country could be the Saudi Arabia of renewables, we’re told.
It should be said, this story ran in the Scottish Daily Mail.
Scottish Renewables is a more predictably pro-renewable renewables group and responded by saying: “Figures for the first six months of 2014 show renewables have overtaken coal, gas and nuclear to be Scotland’s biggest source of power. There is little value in cherry-picking statistics on wind output on certain days of the year.”
It is a good point. And one we’ll keep in mind the next time a certain day of the year produces enough record wind stats to power a million triumphant press releases.
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