Scotland's government has approved a new 900 megawatt gas-fired power station at Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, developed by SSE Thermal and Equinor. The developers say the facility will be equipped with carbon capture technology to remove CO2 from its emissions. SSE Thermal's managing director Finlay McCutcheon said the power station would provide flexible, low-carbon electricity to support a renewables-led energy system while creating jobs in the north-east of Scotland. He added that the project was an important anchor for the wider Scottish Carbon Capture and Storage Cluster.
Environmental campaigners strongly opposed the decision. Katherine May, head of Oxfam Scotland, called it "a startling act of climate hypocrisy", particularly as the approval came on the same day Holyrood debated climate change and climate justice. She said Scotland's political leaders were "trapped in a fossil fuel fantasy where every new project is somehow sold as climate progress". Caroline Rance, head of campaigns at Friends of the Earth Scotland, branded the decision "a catastrophic failure" that would lock Scottish households into decades of fossil fuel reliance, adding that carbon capture was "little more than cynical greenwash" from the fossil fuel industry. She claimed the industry and successive Scottish governments had been promising carbon capture technology "for over 20 years" but it had never materialised.
North East Scotland Green MSP Maggie Chapman said the existing gas power station at Peterhead was already "Scotland's largest source of climate pollution" and the government should be reducing its impact rather than expanding it. She argued that at a time when Scotland should be accelerating its shift to renewables, the decision locked the country into "decades more fossil fuel dependency, based on unproven, expensive carbon capture and storage schemes". She called for investment in long-term green jobs instead.
Scottish ministers said in the approval letter that environmental impacts had been assessed and taken into account in the decision. The project developers stressed that gas-fired generation would play a critical role in the transition to net-zero by supplying reliable backup power while complementing renewable energy. The power station will be built on land at the site of the existing Peterhead plant.
For Scottish households, this decision means locking in decades of exposure to volatile fossil gas prices set on international markets rather than shifting to renewable energy sources, according to campaign groups' analysis.