Meeting of the Parliament 25 February 2015
I am sure that we all welcome that. I heard a good deal about the Peterhead gas CCS project last night at the Shell springboard event in Edinburgh. That is an exciting prospect, and I wish it well. I hope that it can prove the commercial feasibility of gas carbon capture, and I hope that white rose can do the same for coal, but both projects are at a very early stage in proving their effectiveness, so it would be a mistake to make assumptions about either of them, and neither project bears directly on the position at Longannet.
The Scottish Government’s amendment refers to the Scottish Government’s “Electricity Generation Policy Statement—2013”, which the minister quoted on Radio Scotland last week when he was interviewed about the position at Longannet. He quoted that policy statement again today. It envisages
“The scheduled closure of existing plants”
and, as the minister said,
“the construction of a minimum of 2.5 GW of new or replacement efficient fossil fuel electricity generation progressively fitted with CCS”.
The phrase “progressively fitted with CCS” is interesting. It appears to mean possibly building a new coal or gas-fired power station in the 2020s in the hope that it can be successfully retrofitted with carbon capture technology after the event. I hope that that will prove to be the case, but there are many problems with that basic proposition in the Government’s position.
There is an obvious paradox between a legal obligation to seek to meet world-leading targets on carbon emissions and a policy choice to allow new coal-burning plant without CCS built in from the beginning. There is an equally obvious risk in basing an energy policy on the retrofitting of a new technology before that retrofitting or that technology has been shown to work at the required scale. Most seriously, by appearing to imply that future energy needs can be met by burning coal, there is a real risk of the Government misleading the workforce at Longannet on the prospects for their jobs.
Hundreds of valuable jobs are provided directly at Longannet and hundreds more are provided indirectly. The sudden loss of so many jobs in the event of an early closure would hit the local economy hard, especially if the Government and its agencies have not fully engaged with the community in good time. That prospect makes the case again for a resilience fund to be open to councils to bid for support in the case of a sudden economic shock, and we call for such a fund again today.
There is a duty on ministers to engage in meaningful discussion with the council and the community about what will happen when Longannet ceases to generate electricity from coal. That engagement needs to happen urgently and it needs to happen now. It is on that basis that I move the amendment in my name.
I move amendment S4M-12395.3, to leave out from “further notes” to end and insert:
“believes that the Scottish Government is responsible both for its stewardship of the Scottish economy and for the choices that it has made in relation to future energy generation; regrets its failure to address the likely impact of the closure of Longannet on the west Fife economy to date, and calls on it to do so now as a matter of urgency, and further calls for the establishment of a resilience fund, to help support communities affected by a sudden economic shock such as the threatened closure of Longannet.”
15:05Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.