Energy Inquiry
Item 2 is consideration of the evidence that has been received to date in connection with our energy inquiry. Members should have copies of all the written submissions that have been received, including those that were previously missing. As I said last week, a large amount of paper is involved.
The purpose of this item is to ask members to identify key issues for the inquiry. There will be many more detailed investigations of the issues. The clerks will produce an approach paper for our next meeting, on 24 September. Members now have an opportunity to shape the approach that we take.
I am happy to start with the issue that we addressed last week: ends and means in the Government's policy. From the Government paper that we saw last week, there seems to be what could generously be described as a confusion of ends and means, in that the end of reducing the impact of carbon emissions on the climate that might have been expected to justify the means of promoting renewables has disappeared, and the end has become the removal of nuclear power from the energy mix and the promotion of renewables the means.
The member is entitled to his opinion on that. We are here to tease out such matters.
Absolutely. I am not so much addressing an opinion as the confusion that exists about ends and means, which seems to me to be a focal issue that we need to zero in on.
Several submissions succinctly describe what the ends of energy policy might be: a reduced impact on the climate, affordable energy, security of supply and economic benefits. To set as an objective the diminution of one energy source seems odd at the least. The Government's paper did not say, for example—as it should not have—that the Government seeks to reduce coal burning, which might have been a more predictable objective if it wants to reduce carbon emissions; rather, it said, bizarrely, that the Government seeks to remove nuclear power from the energy mix. The means and ends in the Government's policy are a fundamental issue that must inevitably be a key part of the inquiry.
We must discuss that. Do you agree that we need much more accurate measurements of the impacts of various forms of electricity production and energy efficiency and energy saving measures in order to weigh up how the energy policy should ultimately look?
The objective that the committee set itself was to reach conclusions about such things, and it is clear that to do that we must pay heed to the evidence we receive. Scientific assessment of, for example, the carbon impacts of the various energy sources has already been carried out and is in the public domain. We should certainly seek scientific confirmation of those data, but we should not get too bogged down in technical aspects. We need to get the best scientific advice we can on the whole-life carbon costs of wind, coal and nuclear energy, for example, but it is important that we distinguish between ends and means for the big picture of where we should go with the inquiry. The proposition that was made last week in the Government's paper was very unexpected, and we need to try to bottom it out.
Does any member wish to follow up that issue?
We must initially consider Scotland's requirements. Do other committee members agree that a good end for Scotland to aim for would be generating all its electricity through renewables? Should we expand on that and find out how much energy the country could generate for export, so that we could benefit from that? On where we want to go with the inquiry, I do not think that there is any argument about the probability that renewables are far greener than nuclear power or clean coal, for example, although measurements will need to be done in that respect.
That is a point of view.
Yes.
Let us continue to discuss points of view for a bit until we can draw conclusions and therefore help the clerks with their paper.
Dave Thompson's point exemplifies my concern. We might well decide that more renewables would be a good thing—I suspect that we will—but that is not an end, it is a means, which is the distinction that I am keen for us to draw out. The ends are to have reduced carbon emissions, more security of supply, greater affordability and economic benefits. The means are the types of generation or efficiency measures that we choose to get to those ends. Dave Thompson's question reflects the problem with the Government's paper—it confuses means and ends.
Generating all our electricity from renewables could be an end, too. If we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we can do that in Scotland by using renewables, without nuclear. The end could be maximising renewables.
Base-load is another crucial issue. Eigg is just a small island, but it now depends totally for its electricity on renewables. There is a secure and always-on supply of electricity, without any nuclear or coal-fired power to provide a base-load. If that can be done for a small community such as that on Eigg, I would like us to examine exactly how that has been achieved and consider whether it could be translated to the rest of Scotland.
As we tease out the energy debate, many issues will arise. We should not get too hung up on a pro or anti-nuclear argument. We need to look at everything and the answer will come out at the end of the inquiry.
My first point is about the enormous proportion of energy that is used for domestic space heating—it is about 50 per cent of our total energy requirement. That has not been adequately addressed in the submissions that we have received so far. New British housing does not meet grade C in the Common Market scale of energy sustainability, but that area is a crucial part of German policy on reducing energy demand.
Another point that has not been mentioned at all as far as I can see is the global impact of things we import. We import them because they are cheap, but they frequently come from places with a terrible record on carbon emissions, notably China. It would be interesting to see slates of consumer goods that are used in Scotland with a notion of their global carbon imprint. After all, when we are talking about sustainability, we are dealing with global problems.
A third element is the notion of the intangible and the emotional. We had a perfectly well-functioning and fairly egalitarian economy until the 1960s, without mass mobility. When you talk to people about restricting their use of the motor car, you often have the sense that you are proposing a form of slavery. That is an emotional judgment and I would like the costs of it to be quantified.
I have one comment about the end. We must be realistic and have as the end a secure energy supply that gives people confidence that electricity will be available at a reasonable and affordable price.
I would like the inquiry to consider support to business and the interventions that we can make to help business develop new technologies. I am not sure that we are doing that as well as other countries are. We need to examine other European countries so that we do not reinvent the wheel. We need to find out about examples of good practice. We have talked a lot about them, but I am not too clear what they are. We talk about other countries doing something better than us, but which countries are they and what are they doing? I would like research to be done on that.
I will not rehearse the points about the need for energy to be clean and environmentally friendly, as they have been well made already.
An important point that was raised by the Scottish Trades Union Congress was the hope that our inquiry would look at the wider economic and employment impacts of energy policy. That is really important.
Those are the issues for me: the inquiry has to be realistic, and we have to get down to the nitty-gritty and ensure that our country has a secure supply. We have to look at what Government intervention is needed to support business, what is happening in other countries, and at the possible economic and employment impacts. Those are some of the things that I would like the inquiry to cover.
We should look at two or three other wee points quite closely, one of which is carbon credits or offsets. We should probably not be encouraging that because it loads the problem onto the poorer countries that are producing less carbon. If we relatively rich countries go too far down that road, we are not accepting responsibility for the carbon that we are producing; we are just saying, "Och well, we are offsetting it somewhere else in the world." We should look into offsetting in some detail and analyse its impact on other parts of the world.
Carbon capture and storage is also a big issue that we should look at very closely, as is energy efficiency and housing standards, as Christopher Harvie said. When we look at the debate on housing standards, it is quite illuminating to see that affordable housing is built to a higher standard than the other housing in a housing development—
Unaffordable housing?
Well, it is unaffordable now. The so-called affordable housing is built to a much higher standard, but it is difficult for housing associations to purchase the non-affordable, or more expensive, houses because they do not come up to the same standard. Housing, insulation standards and related issues are very important for the long term.
The other big point that we came across when we talked to some of the energy people last year is planning, not just of big developments but of smaller community energy developments. We need to consider the streamlining of the planning system.
One point that follows from what Dave Thompson said about carbon trading schemes in Europe is that they do not necessarily come out clearly in the submissions that we have had, but they are quite central to the way in European Union policy is built up. It is essential that we understand where we fit into that. The European targets include much of the carbon trading system, which has already started to operate, and it must be captured in our report.
Some of the points that I want to make are related to what we have been discussing, and some are not. I have had a chance to read only about a quarter of the submissions so far, so I have not reflected on everything, but I will do so during the next week.
As a punishment?
No; there is a lot of good stuff in the ones I have seen so far.
The first thing that jumped out at me was the idea of carbon capture and storage. Effectively, a competition is going on at the moment to see who will get there first. That would be a good thing for us to look at. Perhaps we should even have a visit to the Scottish Power site to show that the Parliament and the committee think that Scottish Power is capable of it and that Scotland would be an excellent place to have the first fully functioning trial. I hope that the committee will support that; it would be a good thing for us to do.
I would like to see more consistency in how politicians of all stripes deal with energy. Different statistics are used in different ways, sometimes to confuse the public—although I am not blaming any one particular politician for that. Sometimes we hear that it is all about installed capacity and we are doing so well with renewables and installed capacity when in fact that is not the most important way of measuring energy because some types of energy might provide only 20 or 25 per cent of the installed capacity.
At other times, when it suits, the debate seems to be about demand, but demand for Scotland only, which ignores the fact that we are a net exporter. At other times, it is about production. We need to determine whether there is a way of comparing statistics properly so that we have a clear picture.
I agree with Dave Thompson that we should not get bogged down in a pro or anti-nuclear debate—you made that point last week, convener. In this inquiry, all four major parties could take their ideological hats off and consider the facts and reality. If it turns out that the whole of Scotland could be powered by renewable energy, as Eigg is, so be it. If that is what the evidence proves, I have no difficulty with it, but we need to consider the evidence.
There are many fine submissions, but I commend in particular the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which gave a presentation to the committee before you were a member of it, convener. That presentation impressed all committee members. We should take evidence from people who genuinely know their stuff and can put it across in simple terms so that we can make decisions and reports based on reality as opposed to what we hope might happen in future.
The global energy debate tends to focus narrowly on electricity generation. As a number of submissions point out, and as people who gave evidence to the committee in a round-table discussion said, we should bear it in mind that 20 to 25 per cent of carbon emissions—it depends who one believes—come from electricity generation and the rest comes primarily from heating and transport. It is important that we bear that in mind. If the enemy is carbon and we talk only about electricity, we will talk about only 20 per cent of the problem and not really make a big impact on it.
Those are my initial thoughts.
Like Gavin Brown, I must confess that I have not read all the submissions so far, but I have cherry picked my way through them. I re-emphasise what Lewis Macdonald was getting at: none of the major submissions says that we should rule out nuclear power and consider the rest; they say that Scotland has a mix of energy supplies, and we should consider what contribution each of them makes.
This is the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee, so I would like to consider the matter from an economic point of view. Although I accept what Dave Thompson says about Scotland's requirements for energy supply, Scotland has always been a net exporter of energy and it is lucky it has the means to do that. I hope that we will examine closely the arguments on transmission costs. They come through strongly in several submissions and are related to the planning issues that have also been raised. Two or three submissions—I cannot recall which—suggest that the way we transmit the electricity supply might need to be reconfigured and that there could be smaller, local, set-ups that would bring in renewables, as is the case in Eigg, and help where wind and wave power come onshore.
We cannot turn our back on the fact that the energy industry in Scotland provides thousands of jobs and makes a big contribution to the country's economy. We cannot just consider what we can do in Scotland and forget about sending power south or across to Europe. That is where the transmission set-up comes in, whether through planning issues with the Beauly to Denny transmission line or bootlace interconnector plans for each coast. All those issues have to be considered carefully.
I agree completely with Gavin Brown on carbon capture and storage. There is a competition going on between a site in Kent and a site in Scotland and, to be frank, I do not understand why. I would go ahead with both of them, because carbon capture will be needed UK-wide anyway.
There is an interesting piece of evidence about coal. Until I read it, I had not realised that it is not necessary to dig deep mines any more because there is a way getting gas out of coal without digging deep shafts. We should certainly consider such an interesting proposal. After all, Scotland is very lucky in the amount of coal that is accessible without deep-shaft mining.
I want to make it clear that I was not suggesting that we look only at Scotland's needs; I said that we should look at those needs in the first instance and then consider how we might produce more for export to benefit the economy. I want to develop the industry as much as possible, because the bigger the energy industry becomes, the more our economy will benefit.
Doosan Babcock gave a very compelling presentation on coal at the Scottish Council for Development and Industry's energy future conference. It might be good to encourage some kind of competition involving the different methods that have been proposed but, as members have said, they could all be rolled out. The trouble with carbon capture is that it was moved from Peterhead to the middle east. We need a bit more than that. We should certainly have pilot schemes in different parts of Britain.
The Isle of Eigg is a good example, and there have been community-level renewable energy schemes on Colonsay and Gigha. We will also want to consider microgeneration in an urban context, as it will make a contribution. Indeed, Parliament might well be considering a bill on that very issue.
We will need to make some big choices if we are fully to consider the
"production, distribution and more efficient use of energy"
that is set out in the inquiry's remit. Although I share Dave Thompson's enthusiasm for such energy, I should point out that the interpretation of the Natura 2000 regulations, which was mentioned in the evidence that was taken this morning, is a major obstacle. In fact, it is probably the single biggest contributor to the stymieing of a number of major wind power developments over the past 15 or 16 months.
In considering the potential for large-scale renewables generation—as well as for community-level generation, which is also important—we should seek further evidence on the impact of the interpretation of the Natura 2000 regulations. It has certainly had an impact on certain onshore wind power developments, and it runs the risk of stymieing the offshore energy supplies that all parties have said should be developed. We should certainly examine that key issue for the renewables sector.
I agree that we ought to consider carbon capture and storage. The point that has been made about electricity in transport and heat generation is fair, but it should be remembered that a solution to the problem of transport emissions might well lie in electricity generation for hydrogen batteries. The fact that the electricity generated by power stations accounts for a minority of emissions should not take away from the possibility that electricity generation of some sort might provide solutions to heating, transport and power problems.
On certain topics, such as carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, we will have to work carefully with the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee, of which I am a member. As Gavin Brown has made a bid for a visit, I think that we should visit the Pentland Firth and speak to the people at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney. Moreover, the regeneration conference in Caithness, which will take place in a fortnight's time, will consider major developments in tidal power and their impacts on the natural environment.
In its consideration of the forthcoming marine bill, the Rural Affairs and Environment Committee will probably have to arbitrate on the proposals that might be made by various conflicting interests. It is difficult to forget those matters when we are looking at energy policy, so it would be useful for members to see those developments.
I brought with me further information that is not in the submissions—Scottish and Southern Energy's plans for the proposed interconnector from the Western Isles and information on the proposed transmission link for the Viking Energy scheme, from Shetland down to Moray. It would be good if the committee saw the transmission systems that are in place in Scotland and England and elsewhere in Europe, and considered the proposals for major additional transmission systems. That would give us a picture of what is in place and where the gaps are. We could contribute to the debate when we talk about the North Sea grid or other matters.
While we are on the subject of possible visits, I will not suggest that we visit the Sleipner project in Norway, which is a carbon capture and storage prototype—
Why not?
Well, I could be persuaded.
We need to pay attention to the North Sea sector as a present source of energy and as a potential additional sector. I wonder whether members might be interested in visiting St Fergus gas terminal, so that we understand the current contribution it makes and the potential for development there.
Those are good suggestions. We will discuss visits further next week.
As an economic historian for much of my life, I have studied the evolution of businesses. Some can produce change rapidly, but in other cases tremendous delays and backlogs can build up. Examples of rapidity are the Ministry of Munitions during the first world war, which got into its stride within about a year, and the Open University, which was set up in about a year. Other changes, for example fuel cells, can take decades to go through. It is important to build in an economic history capacity so that we can work out which innovations will work and which will just get bogged down.
The carbon impact of the Ministry of Munitions during the first world war was probably considerable, but I agree that we must take a longer view.
We should not forget the need to consider the skills requirements for the sector. I have not read all the submissions, but a fair number of them raise the need for a comprehensive review. Dave Thompson talked about planning, on which we have taken evidence. If we consider the detrimental effect on projects of a lack of planners, we see the need to consider the skills agenda. I would like us to examine where we are and to have a comprehensive review.
We have given the clerks a fairly good brief to be going on with. We will consider the inquiry in more detail next week.
Can I just confirm that you want us to give suggestions for visits at next week's meeting?
The idea is that suggestions will be made and we will firm up our views next week. Any suggestions to the clerks would be valuable.
I was going to mention, as I did last week, that Scottish Power's main control centre happens to be in Kirkintilloch in my constituency, and that it is well worth a visit. It is fascinating to watch how power stations are doing at any given point during the day and where the power is coming from and going to. It is also interesting to talk to the guys who deal daily with loads at key points during the day. The great myth about cups of tea being made at the end of "Coronation Street" is not a myth—it is true. The guys there can show you graphs and tell you about that. Tonight, they will probably have the telly on because they know that at half-time in the European cup game they will have to provide extra power when folk go to get a cup of tea. It is amazing to see that.
Following the meeting that I had with energy people last year, there is an outstanding invitation to visit Ineos, but we can go into that at next week's meeting.
Members can contact Stephen Imrie about visits after the meeting. There are already some bids in place.
Next week, will we also consider which witnesses we want to hear from further?
Yes.
I thank members for their comments. The inquiry will be lively and far reaching.