Official Report 555KB pdf
09:32
Agenda item 2 is the next in our series of themed sessions with cabinet secretaries to try to do justice to as many petitions as possible. This morning’s themed session is on energy and, of course, relates to energy-related petitions. I have to say that, other than by their use of word “energy”, they are hardly connected at all with regard to their scope and range of concerns, unlike some of the justice or health petitions, where there was an obvious thematic connection. They raise quite complicated and sometimes quite technical issues, too.
We are joined by the Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Energy, Gillian Martin, and by the following Scottish Government officials: Catherine Williams, deputy director, onshore electricity, strategy and consents; Robert Martin, head of legislative change and governance; and Antonia Georgieva, head of battery energy storage systems—which are a plague on my constituency, if I am allowed to say so, but such issues will no doubt be touched on as we progress. A very warm welcome to you all, and thank you very much for joining us this morning.
This morning’s evidence-taking session will cover a number of petitions: PE1864, on increasing the ability of communities to influence planning decisions for onshore wind farms; PE1885, on making offering community-shared ownership mandatory for all wind farm development planning proposals; PE2095, on improving the public consultation processes for energy infrastructure projects; PE2109, on halting any further pumped storage hydro schemes on Scottish lochs holding wild Atlantic salmon; PE2157, on updating planning advice for energy storage issues to ensure that it includes clear guidance for the location of battery energy storage systems near residences and communities; PE2159, on halting the production of hydrogen from fresh water; and PE2160, on introducing an energy strategy.
Cabinet secretary, I understand that you would like to start off this morning’s proceedings with a short introductory statement.
I thought that it would be helpful to bring all the petitions together. I am delighted to be here, as it is the first time that I have appeared before the committee.
These issues are matters of great importance to communities, which I completely understand. The petitions are largely about renewables and low-carbon energy, which represent a large economic opportunity, but they have to be managed in a way that brings people with them. I am serious about the fact that people need to see the benefits of energy developments in Scotland as much as possible. While I have been in post, first as energy minister and now as cabinet secretary, I have tried my best to ensure that we have all the levers, both reserved and devolved, to ensure that that is the case.
Investing in new energy generation and the grid to ensure that energy can securely get to where it is needed is essential for energy security. It is also essential to ensure that we capitalise on the low-carbon energy that Scotland is uniquely placed to generate. It will create thousands of jobs and many opportunities for Scottish businesses. Existing transmission upgrades are required and, to be honest, they are long overdue, because the transmission network is very old and will have been subject to various weather events, which are becoming more ferocious across Scotland. The transmission network can be unstable in places. Last week, during the snowstorms in the north-east and the Highlands, thankfully, there were very few outages and those that we had were short. Last year and the year before that, that was not the case.
Energy systems regulation is largely reserved to the United Kingdom Government. As such, there are issues on which I am only able to seek to influence the UK Government. I will outline those as I talk about the various petitions. I am aware that communities are concerned about the scale of development and the impact that some of those issues, such as battery storage, would have on them as householders. I am happy to talk about that and provide detail on what we are doing to look at some of the issues that have been raised with us.
It is important that we air and discuss all the themes that the petitions raise. I thank everyone who has gone to the trouble of raising a petition. I have had ministerial responsibility for the energy portfolio for three years and have been making the case to successive UK Governments that community benefits associated with developments must be mandatory and that developers’ engagement with communities must be much better and done earlier in the process. I would like there to be updated guidance that is mandated by the UK Government. There have been developments in that space in the past year or so with the new UK Government, which I am able to tell the committee about.
Recent changes that have been made to UK legislation will allow for the introduction of mandatory pre-application engagement and other improvements in the consenting process for large-scale applications. Our planning and consenting systems also ensure that the issues of cumulative impact and the impact on our natural environment will be considered in the decision-making process. Communities should share in our nation’s energy wealth. Last year, communities were offered £30 million a year in community benefits and we are providing support for them to invest in community energy projects through our community and renewable energy resource scheme—CARES. I have ensured that it is resourced to keep pace with the increasing demand for community energy. The ministerial code limits ministers’ ability to engage directly with communities about specific planning applications or developments that may become planning applications, but I am pleased to be able to answer general questions in the round. I look forward to answering the committee’s questions.
Thank you. I will make a couple of points before I bring in colleagues. Although I talked about the petitions being quite technically varied, community engagement is an underlying theme, which is sometimes prominent and sometimes discrete.
In relation to outages as a result of last week’s weather event, you said that, mercifully, we have been much more fortunate than we were a year ago. Was that in any way due to resilience planning in the interim, or were we just luckier this time than we were the previous time we had bad weather?
That was the result of a combination of a couple of things. There was powdery snow rather than the sort of snow that sticks to overhead transmission lines. I am giving my layman’s assessment, given that I was at the relevant Scottish Government resilience room meetings. There was also a lack of wind—on the whole, it was not particularly windy. Storm Arwen was particularly bad in causing outages because there was an unusual wind pattern that brought down trees in winter, when there would not normally have been wind coming from that particular direction. Trees grow to withstand the wind that they expect. Every day is a school day when you speak to people who deal with such outages. Storm Arwen caused a lot of tree fall, which brought down a lot of lines. On this occasion, there was mainly a particular type of snow and there were not the kinds of winds that would bring down power lines.
You recently wrote to this committee and the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee in relation to a change of ministerial responsibility. It would be helpful for this committee to understand the process and the thinking behind that change in responsibility at this stage in the life of the parliamentary session.
The change was put in train a few months ago. We have been consulting on the good practice principles associated with applications. This is the case that I made: having the responsibility for consents put me in a situation in which I felt that I needed to be able to divorce the policies associated with energy from the eventual decisions, so it was best for the planning minister to have responsibility for consents. In that way, I could be confident that there could be no perception of my having been influenced. It is important that that is understood by communities that have concerns.
I will give a hypothetical example. A community group in the Western Isles might have concerns about project X and want to speak to me as part of the community engagement associated with the project. If, at the end of the process, consent was not given to the project, the applicant could say that I was swayed by my meeting with that community group—there could be the perception that I was influenced by that group. I do not want anything like that to happen. That could be the case when something was consented to or when something was not consented to—it works both ways. I want to ensure that I can engage with every stakeholder, in line with the good practice principles on community engagement.
I was confident that the UK Government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill would give us the power to mandate community engagement, but I had the sense that it would be difficult for me to carry out that engagement as fully as I wanted to. Thankfully, I reached an agreement with the planning minister that he would take on responsibility for the energy consents unit, and the First Minister agreed that I needed to be able to fully engage on all the good practice principles and the developments that the Planning and Infrastructure Bill would allow us to take forward.
Let us move on to the public consultation process for energy infrastructure. Maurice Golden will lead us with questions on that subject.
I welcome the cabinet secretary to the meeting.
There is probably a gap in people’s knowledge in relation to which actors are present in the process for energy infrastructure, whether it be for transmission infrastructure or more local energy infrastructure, so it might be helpful if that could be set out in public.
NESO, the National Energy System Operator, operates the system overall. Transmission owners own the infrastructure, and they are instructed by the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, as the regulator that operates under UK Government licence conditions, to build said infrastructure, which they must justify on the basis of those licence conditions.
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Then there are the DNOs—the distribution network operators—which are perhaps more local. It is as if the transmission owners are the trunk roads and the DNOs are the B roads. Then there is retail, which is what most consumers see. All those actors do things differently.
About two years ago, every party was supportive of both an expansion in said renewables, particularly offshore, and public consultation, as was ingrained in the 1998 Aarhus convention. Today, however, there is a conflict between the environmental principles of public participation and the energy infrastructure.
Given that I have outlined everyone else’s role, it might be helpful if you could outline the Scottish Government’s role in that process, cabinet secretary.
I thank Maurice Golden for setting out the landscape. It is important to be aware of the different roles and the many different players. There are reserved responsibilities associated with transmission in particular. The Electricity Act 1989 is the governing legislation around all the regulations associated with consenting. The Scottish Government’s energy consents unit must conform to everything in the 1989 act. NESO has responsibility for what the transmission network looks like, and must look like, in order to facilitate the getting of the electricity to all the places where it needs to go throughout the whole of the UK.
The previous UK Government worked with NESO, and it has issued its plans for upgrading the transmission infrastructure. Regarding the role of the Scottish Government, ministers have the final consents, once developments have been through the whole process, which is regulated at UK level—although we have planning powers. Any developments over 50MW currently go to the energy consents unit in the Scottish Government; anything under 50MW is decided at local authority level by councillors and the authority. We are currently consulting on changing that threshold—to see what people think about changing it to give more responsibility to councils up to a level beyond 50MW.
We have some of the most stringent environmental conditions in Scotland. A series of documents and assessments must be submitted in applications to the energy consents unit. We do not dictate and cannot dictate to an applicant what the engineering solutions are for their application. Indeed, nowhere in the UK dictates that.
The ECU assesses the application as submitted. Let us say that those in charge of project X want power transmission lines. They have set out the engineering solution that they have found, and they have determined how and where they want to site those lines. We will assess that application as written. We will not dictate in advance that things have to be done in a particular way. It is for them to make an assessment and submit all the documentation associated with environmental impact assessments. That will then go out to all the statutory consultees, which includes local councils. Even if the development is over 50MW and comes to the ECU, local authorities will still be a statutory consultee. If local authorities do not agree with the application as written, it will automatically go to a public inquiry.
If the application goes through the energy consents unit, it will assess all the documentation, assessments and plans that are supplied by the applicant, and then, in accordance with all the regulations and the Electricity Act 1989, it will advise the minister who is making the final determination, with an assessment of what all the statutory consultees have said. It is important to realise that the minister who is looking at that advice can go back to their officials and question certain things, such as, for example, “Why are you giving me this advice when this has happened?”
The minister has to be certain that, when they make a determination, they are not going against any legal advice because, if they do, it might give them an opportunity to turn something down, for example. If officials have given the minister advice to consent to something and all the reasons why, and the minister says, “Nah—I don’t like it,” they need to be certain that they are on solid ground legally, because the decision might be appealed and taken to court.
That is the process and it is very rigorous. Many developers say that we take too long to make determinations. We try our best and we have doubled the capacity of people working in the ECU to streamline the process. That is good for developers, but it is also good for communities, because they get a quicker decision, they know what they are dealing with and it does not drag on for years.
I agree that planning takes too long at times and is not helpful in an investment environment.
Would it be fair to sum up the Scottish Government’s role in this space as being, broadly, to set the narrative—an expansion in renewables, Scotland being number one in the world for tackling climate change and so on—and to determine planning decisions, particularly those above 50MW? Would that be the Scottish Government’s role?
I agree with that, but I would also expand it. As you rightly said, the Scottish Parliament agreed to national planning framework 4, which set the narrative that we want to facilitate as much low-carbon energy as possible to reduce our emissions, but also for energy security reasons. The Scottish Government does not have responsibility for energy security, but we have an interest in it. We also have an interest in economic growth in Scotland, making sure that we provide jobs for the future and that we have an energy industry in Scotland that is able to adapt and pivot to new energies.
So, yes, we set a narrative, but Parliament also set a narrative by agreeing to NPF4, which gives guidance to planning authorities throughout the land—at local authority level and more generally—on what is expected in relation to planning applications.
The risk of black and brown starts being required is far higher than it ever has been, and we require the transmission to do that.
It would be remiss of me to move off energy infrastructure without recognising the plight of the communities. The UK and Scottish Governments have set up a system in which a high amount of energy is generated far away from demand. That means that there is a requirement to transport said electricity a long way to demand. That is not the communities’ fault. By the time that they heard about those requirements, it was a bit too late. To be frank, both Governments failed in that community engagement, as did the other actors, which would have been National Grid, Ofgem and others, until it was far too late.
Before you continue, does Fergus Ewing want to come in on that issue?
No—I will wait until my colleague has finished.
Fine. Maurice, please proceed.
Onshore wind, battery and solar are far more localised. Some of that might be dealt with by the Scottish Government and some of it might be deal with at a council level, and community engagement around that varies.
NESO takes a UK-wide view of requirements and has made positive movements in that direction more recently. What are your thoughts on the Scottish Government’s role? You mentioned the cumulative impact. How is the Government tracking those developments at a council level and marrying that information up with what may be coming to the ECU? What is the view on land use, and on the loss of land for food production, in particular, which might be prime agricultural land?
I absolutely agree that community engagement varies. I feel very strongly that that should change. There should be a level playing field, and I do not think that community engagement should be voluntary. Regardless of the type of energy that is being produced or the activity within energy infrastructure, community engagement should be mandatory. There should be very strict guidance associated with what good practice looks like. The Scottish Government does not have the levers in that regard, but we have good practice principles. As I said, through the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, we have secured the ability for the Scottish ministers to mandate community engagement, which is a very welcome development, because everything around that used to be voluntary.
Such engagement might mean that company A goes into a community to undertake early engagement, with lots of public meetings and many innovative ways of talking with everyone. The company might also make offers of community benefits, work with the community to give them a percentage share of the profits that are associated with the activity, carry out housing retrofit to bring down people’s bills or give the community some kind of endowment to do things that it wants to do in its area. In such cases, neighbouring communities will look at the opportunity that another community is getting and say, ‘‘That’s great. I wish we had that opportunity as well.’’ That is a very positive story.
However, we might have project B, which is of a very similar nature but which is run by a different company that does not do any of that and leaves a very nasty taste in people’s mouths. As far as the public is concerned, the companies are all tarred with the same brush. All that it takes is one company in one area of Scotland—again, let us say the Highlands and Islands—to leave a very bad taste in people’s mouths: it might fail to act in a way that brings the community with it, avoid engaging with or offering anything to the community, or, worse, promise to do things in that community, but then, once the development is through, the community does not see them for dust. There are a number of companies like that and, in future, should another developer—even if it has good intentions—want to do something, it will be told to take a hike.
All the developers should be held to the same standard, which should be mandated at UK level. I also want community benefit to be mandated at UK level. It should not be voluntary; it should be a statutory obligation, whether for battery storage, solar, hydro or onshore wind. That way, everyone will know what is on offer and what they are getting, and developers will all be held to the same standard. Communities should have that engagement and decide how any benefit is used. That dialogue must happen well before the plans are made—it must take place before the application even goes in. Developers or transmission owners should work with communities, understand their concerns and work with them to find engineering solutions, which can then be put into the plans before they get submitted to the ECU, the council or whichever body it is. Developers or transmission owners must also be held to account on delivering the community benefits that they have promised or said that they will give to the community.
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The devolved Governments and the UK Government have commissioned NESO to develop the strategic spatial energy plan. NESO is also developing a regional energy strategic plan for Scotland. Those documents will help to shape the way in which Scotland’s energy infrastructure will need to develop over the coming decades to meet demand and energy security requirements and to assess things such as cumulative effect.
On an individual project basis, cumulative effect is taken into account by the council that determines the applications—at the moment, those are applications for developments that are under 50MW—and by the ECU.
However, not all applications can be predicted. The convener mentioned battery storage, which is an area that has a lot of speculative players. Communities, including my own community, certainly feel the impact of such speculation. They hear word of particular actors that seek to put forward developments—there are lots of actors and they are all speculating. Not all of those developments will go into the application process, but the speculation is enough to make communities feel worried about the cumulative impact. There is probably far more battery storage speculation out there than developments that will come to fruition, but that does not stop communities feeling a bit helpless.
Community engagement is important, and it should not be voluntary. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 now gives us the opportunity to liaise with all stakeholders, including communities, on what they think community engagement should look like. Once we have taken all that evidence and feedback, we will be in a position to say to developers, “This is the mandatory community engagement that you are now subject to and that you must do, and it has been informed by Scotland-wide consultation.” Such consultation will be done in the way that you suggested should have happened in years gone by.
There is sometimes a circle to be squared, particularly in this area but probably in all aspects of planning. We need to recognise that, whether for energy infrastructure or particular energy projects, there might be a community that says no. Community engagement is still important, but, ultimately, it is a difficult circle to square.
Community benefit has been talked about a lot. Whitelee wind farm in the convener’s constituency is—or, at least, was—the biggest onshore wind farm in Europe. Much of the community benefit from that might go to Eaglesham and Waterfoot. However, if you are in Castlemilk, from which the wind farm can be seen, you will perhaps not get the community benefit, because you are outwith the area. The residents of Castlemilk, which is a deprived community, require and would benefit from investment. They are paying for the infrastructure, whether that is through transmission levies or green levies, but they are not receiving the benefit. Similarly, there are not many wind farms in Dundee. Therefore, there will not be much community benefit in Dundee—or in most urban areas.
This is not about the local community that is closest to the infrastructure losing out, but is there a way to spread out the benefit, particularly to individuals who might require it more and are paying for the infrastructure in some way, shape or form?
First of all, I want community benefit to be mandatory. The UK Government has consulted on the issue—the consultation is closed and it is assessing the responses—and I am hopeful that we will have a situation in which community benefit is mandatory. Once that is the case, all the issues of the sort that you have mentioned will have to be worked out. Consideration will have to be given to what “community benefit” means and how “community” is defined.
A community’s proximity to the geographical siting of a development, whatever that might be, is the reason why it should benefit. Because the community is hosting that development or infrastructure, there should be a benefit associated with that, as it is right on the community’s doorstep.
The point that you made about Castlemilk relates to line of sight. As I said, I hope that the UK Government agrees to make community benefit mandatory. Once that has happened, we will need to do a piece of work that involves going out to the public to assess what community benefit should look like, what conditions should be associated with it and who should get it.
There is a trade-off to be made, because if we spread the community benefit too thin, people will feel as though they are not getting much of anything, and communities that host the infrastructure will think, “It’s all very well for that neighbouring city over there to get community benefit, but we’re the ones who’ve got this on our doorstep.” There will be different views on that.
However, the first step is to make community benefit mandatory. At the moment, the picture is too piecemeal. I have been to certain communities where really good work has been done on community benefit and people are delighted with how things have gone. However, we all hear from communities that feel extremely aggrieved, because they have been promised something that has not been delivered, they have not been engaged with properly or they have felt that their views have been ignored. Such things need to be made mandatory—the conditions, the guidance and the protocols on such matters need to be set in stone, and the process needs to be based on good practice.
We published guidance on effective community engagement in local development planning in December 2024. Transmission operators are expected to follow that guidance, which was produced by the ECU, so that they deliver consistent and meaningful pre-application consultation and engagement. Because of the extent to which we were hearing from communities on that issue, we could not wait for the UK Government to set out a mandatory process. We wanted to put in place something that meant that I could hold developers to account by saying, “Here’s the good practice that we’ve asked you to follow.” Of course, we do not have the power to make following that guidance mandatory, but it is there.
In addition, we got Planning Aid Scotland to produce an information sheet for communities—that was published in September last year—and there are guidance notes that explain the role of community hearings.
However, to be honest, until community benefit is made mandatory, the rogues who might be out there, whom people feel aggrieved about, can ignore all that. It needs to be made mandatory.
Speaking of rogues, I think that Fergus Ewing might be next.
I will bring in Mr Ewing in a second, but there are a couple of questions that I would like to follow up on, given that Mr Golden has been kind enough to reference my constituency and the Whitelee wind farm, of which members of the community are all immensely proud.
It has been an interesting journey, which, in some ways, is typical of what happens with such developments. I can remember the community having very fierce objections to it, yet anybody who has been born during the lifetime of its existence simply accepts the fact that it is there. I might include in the community benefit of the wind farm the incredible leisure opportunities that have been provided in its precincts, which include the visitor centre and the bike trails. Those facilities are very widely used.
Having said that, although the people of Eaglesham and Waterfoot thought that the community benefit would all go to their areas, as Mr Golden said, that was not the case. As a resident of Waterfoot, I can say that we are very proud of our park bench, which appears to be the only community benefit that we received, because the council moved in and decided that it would assume responsibility for the community benefit, which now goes to the entire council area, including parts of the Leverndale valley such as Barrhead, Uplawmoor and Neilston that do not see the Whitelee wind farm, unlike the people of Castlemilk. Sometimes, as you say, the benefit can be quite widely spread. Of course, as some suspect, a council could start to use the benefit to subsidise its own core spending as opposed to delivering the incremental benefit that I think many people would hope would transpire. Have you come across that sentiment, which might be widely held?
Absolutely. When—if—community engagement becomes mandatory, we are going to consult widely on the issue and the good practice that is associated with it. However, the issue that you have just described, of people not seeing community benefit, is the cause of the problem of communities not buying into these developments.
I am almost becoming like a broken record, but we are no longer in the realms of painting the scout hut or buying football strips for the school team. There has to be a substantial and meaningful community benefit that will improve that community. I believe very strongly that it should be the community that decides how the money is spent.
I will give you an example from my constituency. Vattenfall had a process in which it worked directly with all the associated communities around its Aberdeen offshore wind farm, including community councils and community groups, to see where its community benefit should go. The process was quite wide ranging, and there are communities in the west of Aberdeenshire that cannot see the sea that got community benefit from it while some coastal communities that bid for money did not get any. It is all about balance. Again, spreading the community benefit too thin is a problem.
I am not currying favour with you, convener, but I would say that it is a bit disappointing that you only got a park bench out of it. However, what a great dog walk Whitelee is. I have family in the area, and we often go up there to walk our dogs.
You referred to the consultation about whether or not the threshold should rise above the 50MW level. The consultation does not give an indication of where the Government thinks it might usefully end up. We know that, in England it is at 100MW for wind and solar, and there are views about whether it might be variable across different energy disciplines. Why was the Government shy about indicating what its thinking is on what the threshold might be?
I do not really have a view. I want to hear the views of those who will be making those decisions and the views of the communities. One of the reasons why we went out to consultation was that we felt that the 50MW threshold was getting out of date, because there are more substantial developments than previously and the level might be too low.
Even anecdotally, there are a variety of views. Some councillors do not want that responsibility; they want the level to stay as is. We will hear from those people, but we will also hear from the councillors and the communities who want local decisions to be made locally. I do not really want to dictate through a consultation—that is not what consultations are for. I do not want there to be one offer; I want to know what people think. Do they think that the threshold should be 100MW, 75MW or the same as it is now? Once we have heard those views, we can have a full discussion on what is appropriate.
I detect that the Government is perhaps sympathetic to the idea that the current level is, as you put it, out of date and has perhaps been overtaken by events.
Yes, that has been put to us. We said that we were going to consult on the issue, and I think that the time is right to do it.
I will now bring in Fergus Ewing.
Good morning, minister. I now ask you to risk taking the journey from Castlemilk up to Inverness via the A9. On 12 August, I attended a meeting at which more than 300 people representing more than half the community councils in the whole of the Highland Council area discussed their concerns about the process. I want to ask you about that first, because many of the petitions are asking for the democratisation of the process and specific elements of it.
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I have been attending public meetings for four decades now—rather too many of them—and I have never before encountered the amount of anger that I saw at that meeting. The source of that anger was that, although many of the community councils had made detailed objections about things such as the cumulative impact of a large number of onshore wind farms, grid improvements and substations, what happened next was that, even if Highland Council turned down the application, it then went to you, minister, and the Scottish Government, and in almost every case, the decision was overturned. That was the feeling at that meeting.
I ask you for your reaction to that, and whether you can give us the statistics about the number of applications that you or the Scottish Government have granted and the number of decisions that you have overturned. You might not have that information with you now, but a lot of people would like to see it, because that is at the root of the concern. There is a feeling that democracy does not exist in the wind farm process in Scotland.
I say that in the context that, as you know, both of us are—as most people are in principle—in favour of more renewable energy as part of a balanced grid.
I will get that information—I do not have the tables with all those figures in front of me. We will produce information for the past few years—
I see that the officials have it.
I do not have the information that is associated with that specific time period, but we answered a freedom of information request on that, and I have a figure in front of me: in 10 out of 44 cases, ministers decided against the reporter’s recommendations.
What about local authority decisions, though? I am asking how many were overturned by the Scottish Government.
For projects under 50MW?
All of them.
Do you mean local authority objections to an application?
Yes. The local authority would deal with applications for projects under 50MW, and those above 50MW would go straight to the ECU. How many decisions that were taken by local authorities on applications for projects in which the output was to be under 50MW were overturned by ministers?
I would have to look back at that. In my time as energy minister—Dr Allan then became the energy minister when I became cabinet secretary—I cannot recall calling in a decision that had been made by a local authority.
Okay—I am just conveying the feeling. I think that, for many people who were present at the meeting, what underlies that feeling is that although, as I have stated, most of them, in general, supported moving towards a renewable energy system, there is growing concern in Scotland—and in Britain, I think—that no one is asking or answering the following questions. How much wind energy is enough? How much is too much? What is the actual cost?
Constraint payments last year, 90 per cent of which were attributable to Scottish wind farms, exceeded £1 billion. The strike prices that were announced earlier today are just over £90, which is 11 per cent higher than in the previous round, and higher than current electricity costs in the UK. The UK target is 43GW, with an ambition of 50GW. The average energy usage is 44GW, so the new system will rely entirely on wind.
What happens when the wind does not blow and demand is high? It nearly happened on 8 January 2025, when there were dunkelflaute conditions with low wind and no sunshine; there was high demand and the margin of error was 1.3 per cent, or around 400MW or 500MW. In other words, there were very nearly blackouts on 8 January; we came within a whisker of blackouts.
If that is to be avoided, how, in the Scottish Government’s view, do we balance the grid? Must there not be some gas or nuclear element? Can we rely on interconnectors, given that countries in Europe are increasingly looking to secure and use their own supply and cease or reduce the amounts that are exported to the UK, and on which the UK is completely reliant in dunkelflaute circumstances?
The energy policy that was promised in 2023 has not been published—for which we have had a variety of excuses—so we do not know the answer to any of those questions. It is such a big question, and we must really get an idea of where the Scottish Government thinks that we should go on this, and certainly before the next election.
Every point that Fergus Ewing has just made I have absolute sympathy with. That is why we have asked NESO to do the strategic planning work that I mentioned in response to Maurice Golden. The assessment that it will undertake will give us that detail. It is all about energy security.
On constraint payments, I think that they are an absolute scandal, to be honest, and they are one of the reasons why we need to improve capacity in the grid. Why are we paying developers to stop generating? Most people in Scotland will find it absolutely unbelievable that that is the case. That energy—that electricity—has nowhere to go, and the grid upgrades will allow more of it to go into the grid and to be used.
There are also opportunities for more local offtakers to take that electricity, too, and the Scottish Government has been looking at heat networks—the work that Màiri McAllan is doing—and at the high-intensity industries that we are trying to encourage to come to Scotland, as part of the work that Kate Forbes is doing with the green industrial strategy.
The work that we have asked NESO to do will be absolutely fundamental to how we go forward. We need to ascertain where the energy security and resilience weak spots are and plan accordingly, and that very important work needs to be done to inform what we, in turn, will do. That future strategic spatial energy plan is, in effect, what we have commissioned NESO to do, and it will allow us to ascertain exactly where the weak spots are in the Scottish grid and in energy generation. We can then plan on that basis with the expert advice that it will supply us with.
Winston Churchill put it very pithily—he said that, when it comes to electricity supply, the solution is “variety and variety alone”. Does the Scottish Government recognise that we cannot rely solely on wind, solar and other types of renewables such as hydro and battery storage? There simply will not—cannot—be enough storage within the next 10 to 15 years, at least, to avoid the possibility of constraint payments.
Constraint payments are part of the system. If there were no such payments, the strike price would not have been £90—goodness knows what it would have been. Developers bid on the basis that they will get constraint payments, so if they do not get them, the strike price will be higher. I agree with you, but it leaves a question mark over whether there is too much wind in the system.
I would like to know whether the Scottish Government agrees with me that there must be a continuing backup in the form of gas and/or nuclear—preferably both—to provide a balanced grid and to maintain stability. The stability of the grid is absolutely crucial, because if you lose it, you get the kind of fluctuation and volatility that happened in Spain over the summer, I believe—although the causes of that are under dispute.
Does the Scottish Government agree there must be backup of base load, and that it must be gas and/or nuclear?
You mentioned Spain. At that time, I discussed the issue with someone when I was in Brussels, and actually, it was the generation of wind capacity that brought things back online. However, I take the point more generally. I agree that variety is very important and that, as long as we rely on gas to heat our homes, we need to keep supplying it.
I also think that the UK Government needs to look at the injection of hydrogen into the gas grid. We have the infrastructure, with all the gas pipelines—the gas actually goes in nearby, in my constituency—and they are ready to inject hydrogen into the pipeline as well, which would reduce the amount of associated emissions.
I have pressed the UK Government for more decision making around that. As long as we are using gas, we have to look not only at how we bring down the carbon emissions associated with that but at the various electricity-generating and storage opportunities. We have to look at everything, with one exception, as Fergus Ewing knows very well. I know that he does not agree with his former party’s policy on this, but the SNP’s party policy is that we are against new nuclear.
I also make the point that, regardless of where and how it is generated, electricity needs to fit on a grid, and the grid infrastructure is old and creaking. Until the infrastructure is upgraded throughout the UK, we will have a situation in which we are paying developers to switch off generators.
Well—
I point out that we should stick within the context of the petitions that we are considering this morning, and none of them covers nuclear development.
I was not going to ask about nuclear, but I think that, underlying all the objections, there is a series of wider principled concerns. That is really why I am asking the question; I think that a lot of people would like answers.
I will ask about community ownership in a minute but, before we leave the current topic, I will put one point to you, minister. Although the grid certainly requires to be upgraded, the costs of upgrading it were, this week, estimated at £4 trillion, although that figure is disputed by NESO. That is the scale of the cost. In addition, the timescale for that work will be much longer than Mr Miliband or anyone else who supports it has said will be the case. It will take decades. Is the problem, therefore, that, although there may be solutions in the future such as hydrogen and nuclear fission, and all sorts of possibilities, including more storage, it will be too slow?
Even if we support your policies and Mr Miliband’s policies, the grid upgrade process will inevitably take much longer than he says that it will. The transition from wood to coal took 200 years. The transition from coal to oil, according to Daniel Yergin, the world’s foremost energy expert, took 100 years. How can we expect to move from oil and gas to renewables in just a decade? It is just not on, is it? It is not going to happen. It is for the birds, and therefore the risks that I have described are very serious, and are growing in severity.
I am not here to answer for Ed Miliband. Upgrading the grid infrastructure has actually been the policy of successive UK Governments—it was the previous Government that put in place grid infrastructure upgrades. I take the point that everything like this takes a very long time, but the time to start is now.
I will return to you, Mr Ewing, but I know that Davy Russell is keen to come in. David Torrance is going to cover another area, and I also want to bring in our guest member—I have always encouraged our colleagues across the Parliament to join us to discuss petitions in which they are interested, and Oliver Mundell is with us today.
I will bring in Davy Russell first.
Yes, cabinet secretary, everyone agrees that we need energy security. However, to go back to the issue of initial planning consents for projects over 49MW, do you not think that all schemes should go through the local authorities, rather than only projects up to 49MW, which involve smaller schemes that would have a lower environmental impact?
Whether a project is over 49MW or over 149MW, it does not matter—the larger schemes have a much bigger environmental impact and affect local communities much more. Do you think that everything should, therefore, go through the local authority, and that probably only appeals should bypass that element of the process?
I welcome your views, Mr Russell. You asked me what my view is. The consultation is out there, and I look forward to seeing what you put in by way of a submission to that effect, and the arguments with which you back up what I imagine is your opinion on the matter. Others will have the same view as you.
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In the consultation that we have put out, I want to hear feedback from people so that we can see what the general view is. It is also important to hear the views of those who will be making the decisions. If councils and councillors overwhelmingly want to make all the decisions that are associated with energy developments, we need to take those views into account. However, there will be some—or perhaps many—councils and councillors who do not hold that view, and there might also be communities that do not hold that view. That is why we are doing the consultation.
I know for a fact that my local planning authority, South Lanarkshire, would like a bigger say. I may be digressing a bit, but there is a battery storage scheme in East Renfrewshire, yet all the disruption is in South Lanarkshire. Because the scheme is bigger than 49MW, the local authorities have been bypassed.
I have heard different views on that. I am not talking about people in my party, and I will not divulge who I heard those views from—it was at a public event, but I do not feel comfortable saying who they are. They had a completely different view and wanted the status quo to remain.
Right. In your opening statement, you mentioned having more community schemes, which would be great. However, the price of grid connections for local schemes is extortionate and the connections take more than five years. If a community were to do a local scheme, it could wait for an eternity, and the apparatus could be out of date before there is a connection. Connections are not affordable, which makes schemes less viable.
That is one of the areas in which things could move with regard to community benefit. If a developer comes into an area and has a wind farm development, it could work with the community to share the grid connection for a community energy scheme. That could be a welcome offer for communities.
Substantial developments have been waiting for a long time to get a grid connection. The developers might be told that the development will be connected by a certain time, and then a review is done—as it has been recently—and they will be told that it will actually be five or 10 years beyond what they were originally told. That means that community energy schemes, which generate small amounts of energy, are all the way at the back of the queue.
There will be ways and means in the exercise that I hope we will be able to undertake once—this is wishful thinking—community benefit is made mandatory. That could be one of the opportunities for communities to get a benefit that is not so much about having money on the table—it would certainly not be about having football strips for local primary schools, as important as those are—but involves facilitating communities to have their own community energy scheme that has access to the grid via a shared connection. I think that communities would be excited about those opportunities, for the reasons that you described.
David Torrance will come back in on the point about hydrogen. However, Mr Mundell, do you want first to come in on the areas that we are currently discussing?
Yes—I am grateful to you, convener, and to committee members for making space for me to ask a couple of quick questions. I wanted to come in on the back of what Maurice Golden asked in relation to when communities say no. I also want to link to the point about leaving a bad taste in communities.
It is not just developers that are at fault; it is also the Scottish Government. Communities’ views are discounted in the planning process or given lower priority. The system is fundamentally stacked in favour of developers. Having sat through inquiries, I know exactly how communities feel. People turn up in flash suits and flash cars.
They sweep into communities for weeks at a time; they sit there and tell local people that they are not entitled to a view; they go through, in a dispassionate way, units of land on a map; and they tell people that the effects of these enormous wind farms are not significant, that there is nothing special about the local landscape, and that, for planning consideration to be given to local landscapes and communities, the effects must be more than local.
These are people’s homes and communities that we are talking about—this is where people live—and they are told that their views do not matter. They spend a huge amount of time participating; as Fergus Ewing pointed out, community councils put in long and detailed objections, highlighting why the projects are unsuitable, and at the end of the process, people say, “Well, that’s not part of the process. It doesn’t matter. Those views don’t count for anything.”
My question, then, is this: would it not just be more honest to tell communities, “The system works as intended, and the Scottish Government favours going ahead with these projects, no matter what”?
No, it would not be fair to say that at all. You talked about flash cars and flash suits—I assume that it was the developers that you were talking about.
Yes. They swoop in with teams of 10 or 15 people and spend what I think would be hundreds of thousands of pounds to push these applications through—
Okay—I just wanted to clarify that.
—and communities turn up in good faith, without proper representation or a detailed understanding of the law. To be fair, I think that the reporters do an excellent job in trying to level the playing field. I have seen people in my own community turn up and talk about businesses that they have had for a lifetime and how they serve tourism; landowners, farmers and other local people talk about their knowledge of the hills and the water; and others talk about the impact of light at night on their residential amenity, why they moved to a particular area and what makes it special.
People certainly do not move to many of these remote communities for the bus service, for access to a general practitioner, or in order to be able to go to the cinema. They move there because there is something special about the landscape, and then people who are paid a small fortune come in and tell them that that is nonsense. They humiliate them; they make them feel small; and they make them feel as if those things do not matter.
It is plain to those who live in these communities. You cannot build hundreds of turbines that are 200m-plus tall, with red lights that flash at night, and then tell people, “It’s not going to affect how you feel about where you live” or “It’s not going to have an effect on your home.” However, that is what developers do to try to convince the reporter that they are right and that the community council and all these local people are wrong.
You have asked me about particular instances in your constituency in the chamber before, and I remember you putting it to me that representatives from various developments had been disrespectful to your constituents. Frankly, I think that that is completely out of order. However, it also lends weight to the need to make community engagement mandatory, and to the point that that must have a code of practice associated with it. At the moment, that does not exist.
However, what does exist at the moment is the reporter, who is completely and utterly independent of anyone. Ministers do not get involved in that process—and for very good reason. The reporter is deployed when there is an objection of the type that you have mentioned, in order to make a dispassionate assessment.
But if the reporter can look only at effects that are beyond the local, or at things that have been set out under the planning terms, they are not able to listen to the community’s concerns. They say, “We’ve gone through these land units, and some experts have said that they’re not of national significance.” The units might be of regional significance, and there might be pockets within them that are worth protecting, but the reporter has to take that broader look—and that, in effect, means discounting local views. Those local views do not have a place in the process, because of the rules that have been put in place.
I would just note that all the planning regulations that pertain to Scotland have been passed by this Parliament, and that the Parliament put through national planning framework 4. There are also the regulations associated with the Electricity Act 1989, which are in statute, too. Of course, there are also the statutory consultees and the views that they put in. All of that is taken into account by the reporter.
Robert Martin might be able to give you a little bit more legal background on how the reporter operates.
The cabinet secretary referred to the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, which received royal assent on 18 December last year, which introduces a reform that goes some way to addressing the concerns that you have noted. I would not want to speak on behalf of reporters in the planning and environmental appeals division, but I know that they take considerable steps to try to ensure that the process is open, fair, transparent, and so on. The first petition, PE1864, noted how fraught it can be for communities to go into that environment.
One of the reforms that has been introduced is that, should a planning authority object to an application that has been made to Scottish ministers, reporters will no longer have to hold a full public inquiry in the same way that they did in the past. The reforms that have been introduced replicate the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997, whereby reporters will have the ability to take a more focused view. They have a suite of options that will allow them to consider taking a more proportionate and compassionate look at particular applications, which I hope will go some way to addressing the concerns that the member noted about communities.
I want to make it clear that we have pushed the UK Government to introduce reforms on community engagement as a result of exactly the kind of stories that you have told the committee. Under the devolved settlement, we do not have the ability to make conditions on community engagement and community benefit mandatory and we do not have many of the levers that are associated with electricity infrastructure developments. We have set out good practice principles, but they are toothless, because we do not have those powers.
I engaged early with the UK Government’s energy minister after he was appointed and we discussed these sorts of issues and the need for those two areas to be mandatory, rather than just being set out in good practice principles. We have turned a corner, because a code of practice has been consulted on. The 2025 act is a real step change and provides an opportunity to reform the process and to put such mandatory conditions in place. The next step would be to mandate community benefit, which we talked about previously.
In order for engagement to be meaningful, there has to be the potential for the developer to walk away at an early stage. That is the problem. Ultimately, many developers engage, get an answer that they do not like and then keep going. Do you recognise that there are occasions when developers should walk away? There are examples of developers lodging repeat applications, which have been knocked back, even by the Scottish Government energy consents unit. The same developers then come back a few years later with a slightly different proposal for the same land, and the process starts all over again.
We need to look at each planning application on its own merits. I would say, given the 2025 act and the potential for Scottish ministers to have the power to mandate community engagement, I and my officials will be undertaking a consultation with stakeholders to discuss those issues, so that we can improve the process.
Good morning. My questions are about hydrogen and water production. As the cabinet secretary knows, my constituency has probably attracted more investment than any other through Energy Park Fife for district heating and transportation, and the SGN H100 project. Nearly 400 houses will be heated by and will cook with hydrogen. What assumptions has the Scottish Government made about water usage for hydrogen production? What engagement have you had with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and Scottish Water? There is a need for hydrogen, but in future, there will be a greater need. As you mentioned, hydrogen production could go on to the grid—I think that it could take 25 per cent of current demand. There is talk of hydrogen power stations and hydrogen trains. In Germany, hydrogen is being used in steel plants, because it is a lot cheaper. Therefore, there will be a greater need for it.
10:45
To go back to what Fergus Ewing said, there is an opportunity for constrained power to be used to produce green hydrogen, although the potential for that has not yet been exploited at scale. As you rightly said, in your constituency, the H100 Fife project is leading the way in proving the point that hydrogen could be safely used for heating homes. There are different views on whether that is feasible from a cost point of view, but the H100 project is seeking to prove the concept. I was delighted to be able to visit it to see what it is doing.
Water usage, whether for hydrogen or anything else, is continually assessed by Scottish Water and SEPA. Hydrogen would not be the only high water usage industry. There are many high water usage industries in Scotland, including breweries and distilleries, and hydrogen would be another one. We would need to ensure that we had the volume and the capacity to allow that. Anyone who required to use a great deal of water would have to engage with SEPA and Scottish Water on their plans before they could implement them, because their business case would depend on that water being available. They would need to assess whether they had the volumes that they needed before they put in a planning application associated with what they wanted to do.
In general, water scarcity is becoming a more pressing issue in Scotland. Last year, we had record water scarcity, and river levels were very low. That started a lot earlier in the year than is usually the case. SEPA issues licences for water abstraction from watercourses, and quite a number of people who would ordinarily apply for such licences, such as farmers, were told that they could not take water from watercourses over a period of several months.
Scottish Water monitors the volumes in its reservoirs. Until fairly recently—up until the past few months—Scottish Water’s reservoirs were back at their normal levels, except in Dundee. People think that “sunny Dundee” is just something that a Dundonian came up with for a laugh, but it is genuinely true—rainfall levels in the Dundee area are a lot lower than those in the rest of Scotland. That is why Scottish Water has implemented a household usage pilot in Dundee.
Given the more general concerns that exist, Scottish Water, SEPA and the Scottish Government are working together to produce water scarcity reports and assessments of where water is needed. Consideration needs to be given to the availability of water, whether to produce hydrogen or for anything else. For example, a lot of the beer that Brewdog makes is made in my constituency, which is where the company’s headquarters is. Brewdog had to engage with Scottish Water, because it wanted to expand and it required more water. At the same time, planning applications for new housing developments were going through the council.
An assessment is made at local level of what water is required in particular areas, and that would be the case in relation to hydrogen production.
More generally, your question gives me the opportunity to mention a hobby-horse of mine. We must start treating our water as a precious resource. The fact that it is rainy in Scotland does not mean that we have an abundance of water. We have the best water in the UK when it comes to water quality. However, the supply is not infinite, and we should not take its availability for granted. Scottish Water puts millions of pounds into upgrading its facilities to stop leakages and to bring down the emissions associated with processing our water, and SEPA constantly monitors our river sources and our watercourses.
If a hydrogen producer wanted to invest an awful lot of money in a way that involved counting on water coming from a particular watercourse, that would have to be bottomed out with SEPA well before it put in a planning application.
If someone is in danger of being told by SEPA in the months between April and September that they might not get a licence to take water, that is a pretty precarious position for their business to be in. A combination of all those things applies not just to hydrogen but to anyone who needs a water supply to run their business or housing development, or whatever it is.
I would like to push you on that point, cabinet secretary. It looks as though most of the hydrogen production will be down the east coast, because of the concentration of wind farms there, while most of the vast water reserves are on the west coast. As you pointed out, Fife had water restrictions for months last year. If hydrogen is to be an energy source of the future, how can we ensure that the water supply is there and bring in the investors without affecting traditional industries?
Scottish Water has a critical role to play in that through investment in its infrastructure, and it is well apprised of the potential requirements for water in all communities—it will get that information through councils and local development plans. It will also be mindful of any particular developments that might need water. Scottish Water also knows about the Government’s hydrogen strategy and where population growth and industrial growth are predicted to take place in Scotland.
Of course, individual projects cannot be predicted. There are many different factors relevant to whether hydrogen will become a big player in the energy industry in Scotland. A lot will depend on the market and demand, and a lot will depend on the infrastructure that might be required to get the hydrogen to mainland Europe. You mentioned the fact that the Germans want to use it for making steel, and they are looking at which countries can supply them with it.
Scottish Water cannot predict what applications will come in that will require high water usage. A lot of water will be required not only to produce hydrogen—for example, data centres require coolants and water supply. However, Scottish Water works closely with the Government on its industrial strategy. I have regular meetings with Scottish Water on a range of issues.
We need to get across the message about water scarcity. Scottish Water works with the Scottish Government and the general public on our general water usage, even at household level. Water is not an infinite and cost-free resource. It costs money to get it to the required quality, and we do not want to waste it. We need to get that message across. Businesses pay directly for their water, so they are cognisant of the need not to waste it.
We do not meter water at household level, as is done in England, and we do not want to go down that route. However, in England, where water is metered, people conserve it more. I would prefer us to have a communications campaign for the Scottish public—indeed, Scottish Water does—to get people to think about how much water they use and how they use it.
I will bring Fergus Ewing in in a moment, but we have a petition on pump storage hydro in Scotland and wild salmon—PE2109—and I want to touch on an issue arising from that. How do you set out that impact assessments on hydro projects should take into account the overall or cumulative effect on salmon populations?
SEPA is doing a bit of work on that at the moment. I was interested to see the petition come through, so I reached out to SEPA, which has a working group that is dedicated to pump storage hydro. It is exploring all the challenges that are associated with pump storage hydro and the interaction with watercourses and whether there would be loss or whatever. The group is also looking at the cumulative impacts and at the lack of formal co-ordination agreements for developers who are working on the same body of water. It is also looking at the impact of pump storage hydro on fish more generally, which includes the subject of the petition.
SEPA is developing guidance on the consideration of the cumulative impacts, and I believe that it will consult externally on that. I do not know whether it is doing that yet, but I can find out when it will. That will give the people who lodged the petition and people who are interested in the issue an opportunity to engage in the consultation and to provide their knowledge of the impacts that pump storage hydro is having.
It would be very helpful to have any further detail on that review, including the timescales that are envisaged for it.
We will reach out to SEPA and, as and when any information becomes available, we will pass that on to the committee.
We would be very grateful if you would.
Following on from that point, I am sure that the minister will know that several applications have been submitted for pump storage projects around Loch Ness. As we have heard, there are concerns about the salmon population, angling, recreational interests, and the level of the loch and the Caledonian canal.
There is a group of people who are broadly in favour of pump storage but who feel that the current planning rules do not allow the planning authority to take a holistic view of the cumulative impact—in fact, they prevent it from doing so.
Although I welcome SEPA’s working group, every time I hear about a working group, I think that something might happen in five years’ time if we are lucky, but this problem is here and now. The applications have been submitted and they have to be determined. The problem that the petitioners have is that the applications will all be determined without the council being able to do what the minister has said should be done, in a better system—namely, to take into account the cumulative impact.
How will we avoid decisions being taken that might have significant adverse impacts on the existing interests of salmon fishing, angling and—more widely—the marine environment, recreational interests and the interests of other loch users?
The process that SEPA is undertaking is on-going, and I do not have the results of it. I also cannot talk about live applications, as members know, so I am not going to.
However, SEPA is taking an active look at some of the issues that were brought up in the petition and those that Fergus Ewing mentioned to do with the potential cumulative effect of multiple pump storage hydro developments. We will find out more about that from SEPA, including when it is due to do its consultation.
We are in our final few minutes, Mr Ewing.
Oh, okay. In that case, I will go back to community ownership. The last petition was on the energy strategy in general, which also covers community ownership.
When I was the energy minister, although we did not have the legal power to require community ownership—that remains the case—we had a voluntary scheme that was sponsored by the renewable energy investment fund. That fund—REIF—was used to provide grants to communities to enable them to facilitate the purchase of a community share, on a commercial basis, from the developer. The way it worked was that, if the cost of the community share was, say, £100, REIF would provide £10 and the commercial banks that were involved—Triodos, Close Brothers and the Co-operative Bank—would provide £90. That meant that communities that did not have any money were able to leverage a loan through a Government grant, and the loan would be repaid from the income stream from the project.
Local Energy Scotland did the groundwork so that developers did not have to scamper around the country holding lots of extra meetings and negotiating with communities; that responsibility was taken away from them. That scheme worked extremely well until renewables obligation certificates were summarily withdrawn by the United Kingdom Government and the whole thing fell apart.
I have raised this before in the chamber and with the minister, but what puzzles me is that here we are, five years into the parliamentary session, and nothing has happened. I suggested on more than one occasion that the Scottish National Investment Bank could be encouraged to be involved. After all, we are talking about a commercial transaction, not a freebie. Such an arrangement would allow public money to lever in 1000 per cent more potential benefit.
Taking that approach would mean that people in communities that are presently hostile to such developments would see tangible benefits for them, their children and their grandchildren. That would help in some, but not all, cases—some people would see it as a bribe, but others would welcome it. There are mixed views.
What depresses me is that nothing has been happening for the past five years. Where are the voluntary schemes that, with help from officials, we managed to provide when I was in your shoes?
11:00
I do not agree that nothing has been happening. There is high demand for grants, loans and associated assistance under the community and renewable energy scheme.
When I first met the UK Government’s energy minister once he had come into post, he talked about the UK Government’s local power plan, and I expressly said to him that he should not reinvent the wheel, because we want to expand the capacity of community and renewable energy, given that demand is so high. I am pleased to say that, off the back of that, I was able to secure funding to augment the capacity of Community Energy Scotland through GB Energy. Funding has come straight to CARES via the Scottish Government. The budget, which was announced yesterday, also includes commitments on community energy.
I have also done work relating to repowering opportunities on publicly owned land. We have put in place a scheme that will, in effect, give communities priority in applying for repowering opportunities, which will involve work through CARES. That was not the case previously.
On Fergus Ewing’s general point, developers working with communities to facilitate more community energy is exactly what I want to see happening. I do not want it just to be a case of there being an offer of money on the table, with the message being, “Do with it what you will.”
For communities that want to leverage private finance in order to have a community energy scheme, I agree with Fergus Ewing that there is exciting potential around mandating community benefits, but there is nothing preventing developers from doing that, on a voluntary basis, at the moment. Some developers have done that, but I want to see more of it. I do not know whether every community will want to do that, but the whole point is that it is up to them. That goes back to Jackson Carlaw’s point that communities should be able to decide how they utilise the community benefits.
However, there is no shortage of demand for community energy projects. I am trying my level best to give communities more opportunities to own their own energy. We have set out the repowering opportunities for Forestry and Land Scotland, although I do not have them in front of me. There are a number of such opportunities. I have actively said that community energy schemes should take priority in applications for repowering opportunities, and CARES will assist communities in that regard.
I appreciate your answer and your good intention. I suggested that the Scottish National Investment Bank could be a source of revenue, which is what is required. I cannot help but notice that Mr David Ritchie, who used to work for me as an official in the energy department, is now in charge of the bank and at the helm. Perhaps a phone call to him would help to unlock the funding that is needed to move things up a scale, as you obviously wish to do. That would mean that, in the next session of Parliament, there would not be five years without the significant progress that we would all like to see.
I must put on the record that there has been significant progress on community energy.
I will draw that conversation to a conclusion.
I am not sure whether we touched on this earlier, but is there a date by which you anticipate the new energy strategy being published?
The draft energy strategy and just transition plan has been published, but there are a number of things that we need to bottom out as a result of Supreme Court judgments, particularly those relating to oil and gas licensing. Oil and gas licensing is reserved to the UK Government, but people expect us to take a view on it.
There is no shortage of other energy policy documents that set out our ambition on all sorts of energy. The draft energy strategy has been published for the public, and I have also produced onshore and offshore wind statements and a hydrogen strategy. A great number of policy documents have been published already.
I cannot give an answer to the question about when the final energy strategy will be published.
Do you think that it might be published before the autumn of 2027?
That is when the spatial energy plans will be delivered, so I hope that the strategy will be published by then. However, we have had some curveballs recently. We have had the Finch verdict and various other Supreme Court verdicts, which we must assess so that we can come to an informed view on all those issues and what we think needs to happen. As long as there are no more major curveballs, I hope that the strategy will be published by then.
Thank you very much. That has been a very constructive, engaging and helpful evidence session. Would you like to, in conclusion, mention anything that we have not touched on, or have we covered the ground?
I just want to say how much I welcome talking about all these issues with you, so I thank the committee for inviting me.
Thank you very much. I hope that the session will allow us to advance quite a number of the petitions that cover issues that we have had the opportunity to air today.
With that, I suspend the meeting briefly.
11:06
Meeting suspended.
11:09
On resuming—
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Continued Petitions