Scotland's renewable energy industry has been an object lesson in frustration and thwarted potential. The nation's wind, waves and tides are its other great natural resource alongside its oil and gas, and unlike the hydrocarbons they are not running out. But the progress of attempts to exploit those resources has been disappointingly slow, bedevilled by political and commercial difficulties.
There are signs that the political log-jam may be starting to break. But Scotland still has a long way to go to realise its ambition of becoming the "Saudi Arabia of wind": not least in solving the problem of the long distances between the best locations for producing electricity, and the biggest markets for energy, which are mostly in England.
