The application for the power station was consented on the same day that Holyrood debated the issues of climate change and climate justice.<\/p>\n
The current Peterhead facility has been generating electricity for more than four decades but it is now the last in Scotland to burn fossil fuels.<\/p>\n
SSE has previously said it intends to replace this site with the new ‘Peterhead 2’ – though climate campaigners have raised concerns that both facilities will continue operating together.<\/p>\n
North East Scotland Green MSP Maggie Chapman said the existing gas-powered station was “Scotland’s largest source of climate pollution”.<\/p>\n
She added that “instead of tackling that and reducing its impact, the government has decided to expand it”.<\/p>\n
The decision was also condemned by campaign group Uplift.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson said: “Our high dependency on expensive gas is what’s driving our energy bills up and leading to millions of people facing impossible choices this winter.<\/p>\n
“So, it is inconceivable why the Scottish government would want to lock ourselves into 30 more years of it.”<\/p>\n
A Scottish government spokesperson said the potential impacts on communities, nature and cultural heritage – including the cumulative effects of developments – were “important considerations” in the decision-making process.<\/p>\n
They said the full grounds for the decision were set out in a letter and it “would not be appropriate to comment further”.<\/p>\n
Finlay McCutcheon, managing director of SSE Thermal, said: “This is an important milestone for a project which has the potential to provide the flexible, low-carbon electricity needed to support a renewables-led energy system while creating and sustaining good jobs in the north-east of Scotland.”<\/p>\n
John Underhill, Aberdeen University’s Director for Energy Transition, said the Scottish government’s decision demonstrated its acceptance that gas will be a “vital part of the country’s energy and electricity mix for decades to come” while acknowledging its climate obligations.<\/p>\n
He said: “The decision also provides a much-needed lifeline for the Acorn project (Scottish cluster) too since it gives the latter a new purpose to store emissions from the Peterhead power station after losing supplies of emissions from Grangemouth and Mossmorran when they closed.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The application for the power station was consented on the same day that Holyrood debated the issues of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":815900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-815899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/815900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}