Giant Wind Farms Arise Off Scotland, Easing the Pain of Oil’s Decline

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/business/scotland-wind-farms-offshore.html

By Stanley Reed, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: It was a regular workday for these employees and contractors of a Scottish utility, SSE, and its partners, which operate the vast Beatrice wind farm off the northern tip of Great Britain. ...Mr. Larter also considers himself fortunate to have signed onto a business that is growing as Europe seeks to replace oil and gas, whose production has been a mainstay of this part of Scotland, with cleaner energy. ...These initiatives are attractive to investors and lawmakers because they produce enormous amounts of clean energy and can be placed far enough from shore that they are largely out of sight. Britain is already generating more than 10 percent of its electricity from wind at sea, and on some gusty days, like Nov. 2, wind produces more than half. As energy security becomes a critical issue in wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the country aspires to nearly quadruple offshore capacity over the next decade. ...skepticism about the future of fossil fuels remains strong in Britain and much of Europe, and the numbers tell a story of decline. After reaching a peak in 2014, investment in oil and gas in Britain plummeted by about three-quarters to around £3.7 billion last year, according to Offshore Energies UK, an industry group. Jobs supported by the business have fallen by more than half over roughly a decade, to around 200,000.... 

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