Chamber and committees

Has the minister seen the United Kingdom Climate Change Committee’s report “The Seventh Carbon Budget”, which was published a week or 10 days ago? It concludes very clearly that, although hydrogen will have many other uses in the energy system, it will have no role in domestic heating.

I join others in welcoming the consul general of Ukraine, and I recognise the impact of these discussions on Ukraine and on Ukrainians who are living in Scotland. The Scottish Greens stand fully in support of the political unity in defence of Ukraine’s sovereignty that the First Minister has spoken of and which I had hoped that all political parties would express in the chamber today, instead of making party-political points.

I recognise the dignity of President Zelenskyy and his courageous display of self-respect in the face of the astonishing mistreatment that he was subjected to on Friday. [Applause.] He told the truth and challenged Russian propaganda.

Scotland has strong solidarity with Ukraine and is outraged at those who would abandon it to an aggressor, but these events threaten all countries, including our own. Trump’s choice to realign the US with Russia and against not only Ukraine but democratic Europe is clear, and it is astonishing that some voices in the UK’s politics and media are pretending that the world has not changed fundamentally.

I want to ask the First Minister about a matter that is within his devolved responsibility. Following the US decision to cease cybersecurity operations against Russia, does he agree that he must ensure that data and systems relating to all functions of the Scottish Government and Scottish public services must be secured? Will he urgently commission a review to identify whether any current or potential US partner company should now be considered a security risk?

Will the minister take an intervention?

Will the minister give way?

There is a great deal to talk about, so I hope that the task of dismissing the argument for new nuclear will be the quick part of this speech.

The minister already mentioned costs. The massive up-front capital costs that have to be repaid over the operational lifetime mean that new nuclear will deliver energy at £109 per megawatt hour, compared with less than half of that—£44 for offshore wind, £41 for large-scale solar and just £38 for onshore wind.

On timescales, we know that emission cuts are needed quickly and that nuclear is slow to deliver. That goes for big projects such as Hinkley C, which was announced in 2010 and is unlikely to operate before the 2030s after a vast cost overrun. It is also true for the idea of small modular reactors, with which some nuclear lobbyists have a current love affair. Although designs and prototypes have been in development for decades, they are still not delivering on a commercial scale anywhere in the world.

If SMRs ever end up delivering on their long-promised advantages, those advantages will depend on deployment at scale, including through standardised design models and minimising on-site construction. That is not great for the jobs argument that some of the advocates rely on either.

As for the argument about base-load, if the task before us was simply to rebuild like for like a low-carbon version of the 20th century energy system, the concept of base-load cannot be avoided. However, we are seeing the emergence of a new energy system that is based on diverse, decentralised renewable generation, demand reduction, large-scale deployment of new forms of energy storage and lots of interconnection for highly efficient, long-distance electricity trading between markets, and smart technology to smooth the variability of demand and supply.

All of the range of technologies that I have just described are the reason why we are moving away from the world where centralised base-load generation is required and towards a more diverse, decentralised energy system. In short, the clean, secure and energy-efficient energy system that we need simply does not rely on nuclear.

Let us look at where Scotland’s advantages lie. We have a strong track record on renewables. Successive Governments have set targets that many so-called experts dismissed; they said that renewables would never generate that much. However, those targets were successfully exceeded. In some years, we are now generating more in renewable electricity than the electricity that we consume.

We have skills in oil and gas that can transfer to many new industries, including areas such as green hydrogen, if both Governments are proactive, because we know that the oil and gas companies will not be.

Scotland also has many areas where we need to catch up on lost ground. We waste too much energy and we still construct our buildings as though energy is cheap to use. There have been improvements in energy efficiency standards in new builds, but that must go further. We have to start treating investment in the energy efficiency of existing buildings as a national strategic infrastructure priority.

We rely too much on private ownership and not enough on public and community ownership. There is a strong case for an ambitious target for the amount of wholly community-owned renewable energy in Scotland and for priority access to land for community energy to make that target a reality. The Government must put in place support for community projects to access the capital that they need for repowering. Commercial repowering must also deliver community benefit, just as new-build commercial wind should.

That is in addition to the need to learn from the best of Denmark’s experience, which has been building heat networks for 50 years and doing it for public benefit rather than for private profit, which protects its energy consumers. With communities owning their own heat infrastructure and renewable generating capacity, that experience shows us that we do not need to replicate an energy system that extracts profit from people in fuel poverty.

The cumulative impact issue that you raised will also be affected if the threat of a trade deal with the US continues to loom on the horizon, thereby opening UK markets to products that are produced in a much more deregulated fashion, which would create pressure in this country for further divergence from environmentally necessary policy.

I want to ask you about the European Environment Agency, because your written evidence suggests that there might be benefits from the UK being a member of that body, even though the UK is not a member of the EU. Will you unpack that a little bit? What do you see as being the attractions of being in the EEA for other non-EU member states, and what would be the opportunities if Scotland or the UK were to become a member?

Thank you very much. Can I just double check that I am unmuted?

I take that point, but if you will forgive me, I think that that is a stronger argument for saying that there ought, across all the UK’s Governments, to be a shared approach in order to achieve maximum alignment, unless there is particular reason to diverge, and for saying that what you are seeking would be better achieved or better accomplished by taking, in the other parts of the UK, a similar approach to the Scottish Government’s approach.

You can hear me—that is great. Good morning.

I was not going to get into the policy detail of individual examples of divergence, because it is probably for other policy committees to decide what is the right or the wrong thing to do with some decisions. However, on the overall policy of alignment it seems to me that we have a little bit of a presentational paradox, in that we have always known that some degree of divergence would start to emerge. The longer it goes on, the more it feels that it is a little odd to call it a policy of alignment, given that more examples of divergence are appearing.

However, if we ignore the presentational oddness, it seems to me that we have a policy that seems to be working more or less as intended. It is not hugely rigid—it does not say that we must have alignment to the greatest possible extent in every case, and it does not say that we must have divergence at every opportunity. It does not always place the emphasis on the economic interests of industry, and it recognises that regulation is often intended to achieve social or environmental benefits by constraining harmful things that markets might do. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why we want high-quality regulation.

However, the policy also allows the Government to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Therefore, do you think that the policy, in its overall operation, provides the necessary flexibility, and do you agree that a more rigid approach in either direction would have harmful consequences?