Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different.

There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunny, windy and lower demand in the summer). Last year had more time than ever in negative, and the UK has another 10-20GW of commited offshore wind in construction.

Once this comes online, wind generation will often be over 100% of demand UK wide (right now it peaks over 50% regularly). There is approx 5GW of HVDC (with 1-2/GW a year more planned over the next while), but it won't be enough to export all of it outside the UK (and when it is windy here, it is likely to also be there, so they won't want it either).

This is going to end up with very negative prices for a lot of the time. Considering ~15% of UK supply is made up with nuclear, this is a real problem. You can't stop start nuclear like you can with gas.

So we are going to have to pay massive sums of money to wind producers to shut off production. And we are still going need masses of gas backup which is going to be used increasingly inefficiently to pick up the slack.

This may spur innovation in storage, but we are talking enormous quantities required in a very short period of time.

The actual figure for the UK grid (there is no separate Scotland grid) is just over 40% of net electrical energy demand supplied by renewable sources. If Scotland was severed from the grid it would require fossil fuels and nuclear just like the rest of the UK.

The 97% figure is arrived at by taking British renewable energy that happens to be in Scotland and subtracting that against Scottish energy use. This is in no way accurate and ignores time - there are many periods of time where Scotland's wind turbines aren't spinning and the region is drawing power from the rest of the UK grid.

Canada's economic influence in the world is fairly strongly tied to Oil to the point where over the last 30 years it's correlated with the buying power of the dollar, and certainly the economic veracity of most Alberta.

It also fundamentally alters the surplus/deficit scenario - it's a 'major component' (though not nearly like Norway).

iPhones and many foreign cars in Canada are about 25% more expensive than they were a few years ago for example.

Environmental issues aside, there is a lot of downside - it's not just like all that industry can be shifted from one part of the economy to the other.

Which is exactly what I would expect from island nations. The UK has lots of coast, which means lots of wind. That is a resource to export. The cornerstone of free trade is that some things are worth more in some places and less in others. UK has lots of wind. Maybe they can trade that for imports of luxury goods from elsewhere. If only there was a ready trading partner nearby. Maybe Canada needs power.