I have just read about an “unintended consequence” of Brexit which involves sausages. Unless a derogation is achieved, Britain’s sausage makers will be unable to sell to the EU and Northern Ireland without a “special export health certificate”.
Thirty years ago, legislation to privatise Scotland’s electricity industry was completing its passage through parliament. It created outcomes which were never intended and are ripe for review.
The UK’s biggest power cut in more than a decade has set alarm bells ringing – and the peal is being heard far beyond the immediate causes of the episode.
It did not take long for declarations of a climate emergency to prompt the kind of episode they are assumed in some quarters to legitimise.
Emergencies are not to be taken lightly so I am waiting with interest to find what the UK Parliament and Scottish Government announcements of a climate change emergency add up to.
The 20-year campaign to utilise the renewable energy assets of Shetland and the Western Isles to benefit the entire UK may be approaching end-game with outcomes still wide open.
Former UK energy minister Brian Wilson has criticised the decision to hand the multi-million Moray East Offshore Windfarm deal to Lamprell, describing it as representing “a major failure of policy”.
It is a well-proven maxim that discovering oil can be more of a curse than a blessing and nowhere on the face of the Earth offers better testimony to that than Venezuela, now in the throes of political upheaval.
A recent return to Leipzig reminded me why “going green” in Germany has been a lot more difficult than the rhetoric would sometimes suggest.
Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the Clair field’s discovery and, all going well, it should see the first oil being transported from its second offspring, Clair Ridge.
At time of writing, 5% of the UK’s electricity consumption is coming from wind. Another few per cent is powered by other renewables, mainly long-established hydro; 39% from gas, 21 from nuclear and 22 from coal.