In terms of major infrastructure, the story on net zero is littered with challenges, and not just in the energy networks or the energy system.
With regard to what we really need to happen, we have talked a lot about renewables and offshore wind. I am very confident that that can happen. We have seen how well the current set of market models works; market incentives are delivering vast increases in capacity from offshore wind.
We also need a transmission system such as we have talked about, but it needs to be well co-ordinated. At the moment, offshore wind farms are connected to the shore with point-to-point connection. Given the extent of the increase in capacity that will be necessary over the next 25 to 30 years, that is another issue that needs to be tackled. There are, in the energy white paper that I talked about earlier, clues that Whitehall is thinking about that.
We also need reinforcement of distribution networks. That is not just a transmission question; it needs to happen early so that we can facilitate the increase in demand that we think there will be, especially from electric vehicles and, in time, from decarbonised heat use, which is done through electricity.
From our perspective, the major costs in distribution are in digging up the roads—the civils, as the work is known. Planning ahead for a well-reinforced electricity network at local level is, I suggest, a major infrastructure challenge.
Along with that is electric vehicle charging. How rapidly we can grow the installed base for electric cars will be largely dependent on how easy it is to charge them. We need a better model for that that works for people who do not have off-street parking in our towns and cities. That is another infrastructure challenge that is easy to talk about, but hard to get going.
We have a set of industrial challenges that will require infrastructure for carbon capture and storage. Scotland needs to be thinking now about where that infrastructure will be, how it will be paid for and whether the model that is being worked on in Whitehall will work for the Scottish projects. We will need capacity for hydrogen to be generated and used, especially in industry, as an alternative to fossil fuels.
I have saved the best until last. The biggest infrastructure challenge of all is the overall question of how we decarbonise Scotland’s heat system and move away from nearly all current use of fossil fuels to something that is fully decarbonised. That will involve a set of things playing out over the next few years. The Scottish Government has, in the climate change plan, been hugely ambitious about how quickly those things can be pulled off.
We will need to construct the district heating networks that we talked about earlier. Hydrogen might have a role when it comes to domestic heat; it certainly has a role for industry. Those networks need to be in place. The other network that needs to work for heat is the electricity network. It needs to be reinforced to be ready for all the uses that we will have for that electricity, so that we can keep Scottish homes, and Scottish buildings more generally, warm in the decarbonised future.
That amounts to an enormous infrastructure programme. We think that it is perfectly achievable, but it is not to be sniffed at. We must plan it carefully. I am looking forward to seeing the Scottish Government’s delayed national planning framework for a clue as to how that will all come together.