Onshore wind must not be “a bunch of salivating subsidy junkies trying to beat on the government’s door trying to embarrass it into maintaining subsidies,” Scottish Power chief operating officer Keith Anderson told delegates at the All Energy Conference in Glasgow today.

But in fact Anderson wanted to put forward a positive message for the renewables industry, saying that onshore wind was now a competitive technology and “we need to look at what we have achieved”.

Anderson’s challenge to “subsidy junkies” came as he set out priorities for the industry. He said with growing renewable energy targets and at a time when the first projects were reaching the end of their subsidy-lives “none of us can look at a world where we are switching off renewable energy investment”. He said the industry needed flexibility from government but “we need to sit down and work out a framework” for life extension.

Curtailments

Anderson also told the industry it must not be afraid to talk about curtailments – saying 50,000GWh of renewable energy had been curtailed over the easter weekend. The industry was afraid curtailment would be seen as subsidy but “it is a fact of life for the UK energy system”, he said, so the next priority was storage, which he said was “one of the most pressing issues our industry faces”.

“We are throwing renewable energy away”, Anderson said, saying storage was needed at all levels from grid to domestic. But that required innovation and development. Scottish Power and SSE had both looked at pumped storage plant, he noted, but there was no framework and no policy to support it.

Finally Anderson dismissed the option of carbon capture and storage. He said Scottish Power’s experience at Longannet had shown that “technically you can do it but the cost is horrific”.