Chamber and committees

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For projects under 50MW?