Scottish & Southern outlines CO2 plans

LONDON - Scottish & Southern Energy said on Monday it expected this year's results to slightly beat forecasts, as it unveiled a raft of new projects to cut CO2 emissions.

Scottish & Southern (SSE) said it expected to invest over 600 million pounds ($1.2 billion) in coal, gas, hydro and wind power between now and the end of the decade.

The plans include adding carbon capture technologies to power plants including Ferrybridge, Marchwood, and Peterhead and building wind and wave energy farms. It will also buy carbon credits from Brazil.

But Chief Executive Ian Marchant said any carbon capture would likely be too far in the future to contribute to the EU-wide goal of cutting CO2 emissions 20 percent by 2020.

"The issue of carbon capture is about what we do from 2020 onwards," he told Reuters.

The merger of SSE's Renewable Technology Ventures and Scotland's Aquamarine Power will lead to the launch of a wave power device by next summer and a tidal power device by mid-2009, said Marchant.

Britain could be generating 15-20 percent of its power from wave and tidal energy within 20 to 30 years, he added.

Scottish & Southern's plans to build a new hydroelectric power plant at Glendoe on the shores of Loch Ness are well on schedule.

"I think the tunnelling machine will appear and break ground in December, and they're saying June for shutting the valve and the reservoir starting to fill," said Marchant.

The group is also looking at a new pump storage hydroelectric project that could generate tens of megawatts of electricity, he added.

SSE is aiming to have around 1,000 megawatts of hydro and wind generation capacity by the end of this decade, and a review of its Beatrice offshore wind farm has indicated a further 1,000 megawatts of offshore wind power might be viable.

However, the group faces commercial hurdles over leasing the seabed and transmission charges, as well as technical challenges for offshore wind, said Marchant.

Scottish & Southern said results would be slightly ahead of brokers' expectations. Analysts polled by Reuters expect average pretax, pre-exceptional profit of 1.186 billion pounds.