Bringing forward a new source of energy tends to be a costly and extremely controversial business.
Let’s not lie about this no one wants their little patch of this earth to be the guinea pig for an untried power source.
No one wants those big, ugly towers that come with the brutalist architecture of the power station at the bottom of their garden.
And no one wants to be in the firing line if that new and scary source of power happens to go wrong.
That is all just common sense.
But outside of recycling a few bottles and making a compost heap for the garden, very few of us take real responsibility for our own impact on the world and lead anything like a sustainable life.
Very few of us (if any) are carbon neutral and energy positive.
We are net consumers of energy and the power for the lights, the mobile phone and iPad chargers, the gas for the central heating and the fuel for that car sitting on the drive have to come from somewhere.
We are used to having safe, relatively cheap power at our fingertips but that is a luxury that generations before us could only wonder at.
Life is much easier today because bold decisions were taken in the past.
Scotland has relied on hydro power for generations but it is a hugely invasive technology like no other.
I can only imagine at the street marches, the social media explosion and the tidal wave of flak that our politicians would face if anyone dared to suggest these days that damming up and flooding one of Scotland’s great glens was a good idea to produce power.
Times may have changed but the dilemma of how to sustainably produce power remains as prescient as ever.
I, for one, would love to see Scotland reach and significantly surpass its green energy targets.
My preference would be to let the sea and the wind (preferably offshore) take the strain.
If we can find any sun to harness in our corner of the world then great.
But right now that is nowhere near enough to sate the power demand.
And that is where things veer back into controversial territory.
This week, Cluff Natural Resources announced it had made “significant progress” in its plan to produce gas from coal seams under the Forth.
It would be the first deep offshore underground Coal Gasification project (UCG) in the UK and would involve igniting the coal under the river bed.
Now, I’ve been in this game long enough to recognise that a project that seemingly wants to set fire to Fife is going to generate headlines.
But in reality Cluff wants to deploy a technology which has been successfully used elsewhere around the globe.
I am certainly no UCG evangelist it is up to Cluff and others to prove the technology is safe and its environmental impact is acceptable prior to commercial deployment but the simple truth is we cannot afford to dismiss such schemes out of hand.
Sail a little further along the Forth and you will pass by Ineos’s sprawling petrochemicals site at Grangemouth.
In the past days, the Swiss firm has topped out the site’s new storage tank a monster that could fit 560 double decker buses inside of it.
But what it will actually hold is ethane imported by ship from the US. What Ineos hopes it will hold in future is indigenous shale gas extracted from the Forth Valley, despite the fact there is a moratorium on the industry in Scotland.
It is clear that Ineos and others are serious about their intention and it is right the environmental lobby hold them to account and bang the drum for sustainable development.
But with no sign of our societal craving for power coming to an end any time soon, something will have to give.
Meantime, let the debate rage on.