Pumped hydro makes sense in a grid where a steady supply needs small rebalancing around peak times; it makes absolutely no sense as a storage for an all-renewables grid, and least of all, one predominately dependent on wind.

Such renewables grid requires strategic storage with capacity in the order of weeks, to tie us over the settled high pressure periods (which happen multiple times a year and can indeed last for weeks). Pumped hydro has capacity in the order of hours, so in the context of the renewables transition it’s nothing more than another money spinner in the Scottish renewables gold rush.

The simple truth is that a predominantly wind-based grid is not viable, and since in Scotland we don’t have the potential for non-pumped hydro, and tidal is not happening on the required scale in our lifetimes (and probably never), we don’t have a way of building an even remotely self-sufficient renewables-only grid.

We really need to get our heads out of the sand on this, as we are sacrificing land on an altar of a made up deity for naught.

There are only two ways forward for Scotland (and UK as a whole): either we move toward a largely nuclear-powered grid, or we reduce our energy consumption by at least an order of magnitude (people keep forgetting that decarbonisation, even without further growth in energy demand, means electricity consumption growing at least fivefold).

Neither is happening, or likely to happen. There is no appetite for nuclear in Scotland, and the required drastic reduction in consumption will not happen on voluntary basis, given that our economy is based purely on creating ‘wealth’; the renewables gold rush is again driven by greed rather than concerns for the environment.

The necessary, and tragic, consequence of this is that we will continue to rely primarily on hydrocarbons for our excessive energy consumption in the future, with all that it entails. And when the shite really hits the fan, we will need all that land to grow turnips.