POWER LINES: Scotland's renewable energy transition is changing not only the landscape, but the way decisions about that landscape are made.

Scotland is in a slightly unusual position when it comes to renewable energy. It has some of the best natural resources for wind and hydroelectric generation in Europe, considerable areas of relatively sparsely populated land, and a political commitment to reducing dependence on fossil fuels. At the same time, much of the electricity being generated is not necessarily being consumed close to where it is produced.

This creates a problem which is less visible than the turbines themselves.

The Scottish Government's latest figures show that renewable generation reached a record 13.4 terawatt hours in the first quarter of 2026. There was also 18.1 GW of operational renewable capacity, with another 85.4 GW represented by projects in the planning pipeline. Storage is growing too, although the scale of proposed battery capacity is considerably greater than that currently operating.

These are impressive figures. They also reveal something about the nature of the transition. Moving towards renewable energy is not simply a matter of building more wind turbines. It requires a substantial reorganisation of the infrastructure through which electricity is generated, stored, transmitted and ultimately used.

That infrastructure is increasingly determining what can actually happen.

The problem with having too much electricity

One of the strange features of renewable electricity is that having a lot of it can itself create difficulties.

Wind turbines do not produce electricity according to when consumers need it. They produce it when the wind blows. If there is insufficient transmission capacity to move electricity to where it is needed, or insufficient demand or storage at a particular moment, generation may have to be reduced.

This is one reason why the electricity grid has become such an important part of the renewable energy debate.

Scotland already produces substantially more renewable electricity than it consumes. In 2025, renewable generation was around 38.5 TWh, while Scotland was a net exporter of approximately 20.8 TWh of electricity. Much of the future expansion will therefore depend on the ability to move electricity beyond the places where it is generated.

This is particularly significant geographically. Some of the country's greatest renewable resources are in the north and west, while a considerable proportion of electricity demand is further south.

The landscape can therefore tell us something which the national statistics cannot. A wind farm may be located in one community, a transmission line may cross another, a battery may be proposed in a third, while the electricity itself is ultimately destined for somewhere else.

The question then becomes: who decides how this system is organised?

From a queue to a system

Until recently, one of the major obstacles was the electricity connections queue.

Developers seeking to connect new generation or storage projects could spend years waiting for a connection, even where some of the projects ahead of them were unlikely to be built. The result was effectively a queue for a future electricity system which contained considerably more proposed capacity than could realistically be delivered.

NESO, the National Energy System Operator, has been attempting to change this through its connections reforms. The old system was largely based on the principle of joining the queue and waiting. The new approach is intended to prioritise projects which are considered more likely to be deliverable and which contribute to the country's strategic energy requirements.

By June 2026, NESO and the network companies had issued connection offers covering around 37 GW of capacity to 713 projects.

On one level this looks like a fairly straightforward administrative reform. But there is another way of looking at it.

Someone has to decide which projects are important enough to move forward.

That means that the electricity grid is not simply an engineering system. It is also a system of choices.

Those choices might be made according to apparently objective criteria: readiness, efficiency, cost, network requirements, strategic importance or projected demand. But the criteria themselves are political decisions, even when they are presented as technical ones.

When infrastructure becomes software

This is where the recent controversy surrounding NESO and Palantir becomes interesting.

NESO awarded Palantir a £21 million contract without inviting competing bids, arguing that a legal exemption applied because of technical dependency on the company's existing system. The software is used in important areas of NESO's work, including the electricity connections process and the calculation of so-called "skip rates" in electricity dispatch.

The immediate issue is whether it is sensible for a critical part of Britain's electricity infrastructure to become dependent on a particular technology company.

There is a wider question, though, which is perhaps more relevant to the future of renewable energy.

What happens when decisions about infrastructure increasingly depend on software?

A grid operator has always had to make decisions about what electricity should be generated, where it should go and when particular generators should be used. What changes when some of those decisions are mediated through databases, models and algorithms?

The decision does not necessarily disappear. It becomes less visible.

This is one of the reasons that Michel Foucault's ideas about power remain useful. Power does not have to look like somebody giving an order. It can operate through systems of classification, measurement and knowledge. Once something is categorised, measured and ranked, certain possibilities become easier to pursue than others.

The electricity system provides a particularly clear example.

A project can become "ready" or "not ready". A generator can become "economic" or "uneconomic". A connection can become strategically important or relatively unimportant. A particular use of the network can be judged efficient or inefficient.

None of these categories is necessarily unreasonable. The point is that they have consequences.

They help determine what gets built.

The geography of decision-making

There is another tension here.

The physical infrastructure of renewable energy is local. It exists somewhere.

A turbine occupies a particular hillside. A substation occupies a particular piece of land. A battery storage facility sits beside a particular road. A transmission line crosses particular communities.

But the organisations making decisions about these things may be considerably further away.

Some decisions are made by governments and regulators. Others are made by large energy companies, investors, network operators and technology companies. Increasingly, the financial and technical systems behind renewable infrastructure are international.

This produces an interesting imbalance.

The consequences of a decision may be experienced locally while the decision itself is made elsewhere.

This is not unique to renewable energy. It is a familiar characteristic of contemporary economic life. The same pattern can be seen in housing, transport, agriculture and communications. Decisions which affect a particular place are often made through institutions which have little direct relationship with that place.

Renewable energy simply makes the contradiction particularly visible because the infrastructure is so physical.

A community can see the turbines and pylons. It may not be able to see the financial arrangements, network models or software systems that helped determine why they are there.

What would Bookchin make of it?

This is where Murray Bookchin provides a rather different way into the question.

Bookchin's concern was not simply with environmental degradation. He was interested in the relationship between ecological problems and the organisation of society itself. His argument was that environmental problems could not be separated from questions of hierarchy, economic organisation and political control.

That seems relevant to the renewable transition.

There is an understandable temptation to think that once the electricity is renewable, the political problem has largely been solved. Fossil fuels are replaced by wind, solar or hydro; emissions fall; therefore progress has been made.

But the ownership and control of the system still matter.

If renewable infrastructure is largely controlled through distant corporations, financial institutions and centralised technical systems, then the transition may solve one problem while leaving another largely untouched.

Bookchin's emphasis on decentralisation and local democratic organisation raises a different possibility. What might an energy system look like if communities were not simply consulted about infrastructure but had some meaningful control over it?

That could mean community-owned generation. It could mean local energy cooperatives, shared battery storage or municipal energy systems. It could mean communities having a greater role in determining how energy infrastructure is developed rather than simply responding to proposals made elsewhere.

The point is not that every energy decision can or should be made locally. Electricity networks obviously have to operate across geographical boundaries. A national grid cannot be reduced to a collection of independent local systems.

The question is instead about where meaningful participation is possible.

The space between

This brings us back to the idea of the Third Place.

The term normally refers to places outside the home and workplace where people meet and develop relationships: cafés, community centres, libraries, pubs and other informal spaces.

But there is another way of thinking about it.

A third place can also be understood as a space between the individual and the institution. It is somewhere that people can come together to make sense of systems which would otherwise be too large or complicated for any one person to influence.

Energy is a good example.

For most people, the electricity system is largely invisible. We receive a bill, turn on a light and expect the system to work. The complexity behind that apparently simple action is considerable.

Yet the consequences of the system are increasingly visible in communities.

There are planning applications. New pylons. Wind farms. Battery developments. Substations. Changes to land use. Questions about who owns infrastructure and where the financial benefits go.

There is therefore a potential role for spaces in which these issues can be discussed collectively rather than encountered as individual planning objections or technical consultations.

That distinction is important.

Consultation generally asks people to respond to a decision which has already been formulated.

Participation implies something more.

It suggests that people have some capacity to shape the question itself.

Beyond consultation

Scotland already has examples of communities attempting to take greater control of energy resources. Community energy projects, cooperatives and locally owned renewable schemes demonstrate that renewable infrastructure does not necessarily have to be synonymous with large-scale corporate ownership.

But these projects also raise difficult questions.

How much can genuinely be localised? How are projects financed? Who has the technical expertise to participate? What happens when local interests conflict with national requirements? And how do we prevent participation becoming something available primarily to communities with the time, money and organisational capacity to engage?

These are not arguments against renewable energy.

They are arguments for taking the politics of renewable energy seriously.

The transition will require enormous amounts of capital, engineering expertise and national coordination. There is no realistic way around that. But recognising the necessity of large-scale infrastructure does not mean that democratic participation has to disappear from the process.

In fact, the opposite may be true.The more complex the system becomes, the more important it may be to create places where people can understand and question it.

A different kind of energy question

The Scottish renewable energy debate is therefore about more than energy.

It is about the relationship between infrastructure and place. It is about whether decisions are made through democratic institutions or through increasingly technical systems which are difficult for most people to understand. It is about the role of private capital in building infrastructure which ultimately has public consequences.

And it is about whether the transition to renewable energy changes the distribution of power, or simply changes what that power is used to build.

The arrival of more batteries, turbines, transmission lines and digital systems will undoubtedly change Scotland's physical landscape. But it will also change the institutional landscape behind it.

That may be the more important change to understand.

A renewable energy system could become more decentralised, with communities taking greater responsibility for generation, storage and decision-making. Or it could become increasingly centralised, with enormous infrastructure networks managed through a combination of government, corporate finance and sophisticated software.

Neither outcome is inevitable.

That is why the question of who controls the transition matters.

Scotland has an opportunity to build a renewable energy system which is not only lower-carbon, but more connected to the communities in which it exists. The challenge is to ensure that those communities are not simply places through which infrastructure passes.

They need to be places where decisions can also be made.

Community members participating in a local clean-up event.

In the end, the conversations we have today will shape the world we leave behind. Let us engage, inspire, and take action for a sustainable future.