SSE is pulling the wool over your eyes!
On Wednesday 22nd May, energy giant SSE released their profit figures for the last financial year – a staggering £2.4 billion.
SSE operates 14 fossil fuel burning power stations and 60% of the company’s energy generation comes from burning fossil fuels. This profit is a direct result of our sky-high energy bills, which have plunged millions of households into fuel poverty.
We went to their offices in Perth to support our friends in the North Sea Knitters group, who staged a ‘knit in’ in the lobby and demanded to speak to the bosses at SSE Thermal, the part of the company that is planning to develop the new gas burning power station in Peterhead.
While the knitters had a long conversation with two of the SSE Thermal bosses, they came away unconvinced that the company has a climate or business case for building the new power plant.
Meanwhile, other activists made their presence known outside the office with signs exposing SSE as Scotland’s biggest polluter 5 years in a row, and declaring new gas infrastructure to be a ‘stitch up’.
Building a new gas burning power station in Peterhead would lock us into continued demand for gas from the North Sea for decades, when instead we need to be rapidly transitioning to renewable energy.
SSE’s greenwashed case for the new gas burning power plant is unravelling: their plan relies on carbon capture and storage technology which has not been successful anywhere in the world. SSE’s claims about the amount of climate changing emissions from the plant that will be captured are completely unprecedented.
SSE is making huge profits from burning gas and they want to continue doing so for decades to come – but we won’t let them get away with this.
If you want to get involved in the campaign to resist this new fossil fuel development in Peterhead, you can sign up for our interactive Resisting Fossil Fuels online workshop on Thursday 13th June from 6 – 7.30pm.
You can also sign the petition to the Scottish Government urging them to reject the Peterhead proposals