A petition calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to investigate the circumstances whereby it agreed that 60 hydro-power stations could be accredited for subsidy under the Renewables Obligation scheme and that generation capacity could be cut to below the 20 megawatt qualification threshold at others to enable accreditation and whether, in the interests of electricity consumers, it will rescind these accreditations.
Just how Scotland's hydro-power electricity generators make so much money from subsidies (over and above the normal selling price of the electricity) when consumers everywhere are facing high electricity prices is a complex story. It is explained in the documents presented here.
- Attached to this is a note reporting the petitioners' calculation of the money earned by the three main Scottish hydro operators since the RO scheme started in 2002. Currently, it is almost £100 million a year.

A fuller account is available in a paper published in 2005 by a private research group, the Scottish Wind Assessment Project, called Subsidies and Subterfuge.

|