Scotland just began running Europe's largest onshore wind farm this morning. It's called Whitelee and its 140 turbines are enough to power Glasgow. Plans to expand it-and build another, bigger one-are already underway. From The Guardian:"The first minister Alex Salmond announced that the 322MW Whitelee wind farm south of Glasgow had been given permission to increase its capacity to 452MW, as he officially switched on the wind farm this morning.The disclosure came as plans for an even larger scheme, to build a vast community-owned 150 turbine, 540MW scheme on Shetland, were lodged with the Scottish government.Both projects would significantly boost Salmond's plans for half of all Scotland's electricity to come from green sources by 2020. The interim target-to generate 31 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2011-has already been surpassed, officials said."So Scotland's been killing it recently. But how are they doing overall? Here's Europe's sensible energy source leaderboard, as of 2005 (from the BBC):If those claims about Scotland now being able to produce 31 percent of its energy from wind power, it will have leapt into the top five here (when considered separately from the rest of the United Kingdom, of course). And officials say that, in theory, Scotland could generate ten times its peak power demand from wind sources.
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