A WIND farm that has enraged billionaire businessman Donald Trump could help cut the cost of renewable energy production by £45 billion, according to its developer.
Swedish power firm Vattenfall told Holyrood's Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee sites such as its European offshore wind deployment centre are required to meet the UK's renewable energy targets.
Jason Ormiston, the firm's head of public and regulatory affairs, told the committee yesterday that wind farms could see gross value added to the UK economy of £7bn and a cumulative cost-reduction impact of £45bn for the whole offshore wind sector in UK waters by 2050.
He was backed by Welsh developer West Coast Energy, which said research and development is vital to convince sceptical investors such as Citigroup's Peter Atherton that the technology works.
Steve Salt, West Coast Energy planning and development director, said: "Industry and companies like ours need access to world-class test facilities to test technologies to demonstrate that they work and drive down the cost.
"In so doing, you give investors like Citigroup and others confidence that these technologies will actually work."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article