Meeting of the Parliament 11 November 2015
I am very grateful to Mr Salmond for that further information. Like midges, a lot of small Scotsmen are equally difficult to exterminate.
Energy storage is also used to provide a degree of energy security. The pumped storage facility at Cruachan provides the initial black-start power to jump-start the system in the event of a system-wide failure.
With the advent of renewable energy, with all its possibilities and opportunities, energy storage is even more critical. Critics of wind energy often make the self-evident observation that the wind does not blow all the time—they might not have talked to some of my constituents in Tiree. That is a backward-looking, Luddite view of centralised energy production, which fails to recognise that the current energy system is failing us.
The evidence of failure is in our high energy costs, with rates of fuel poverty of more than 30 per cent across Scotland and more than 50 per cent on some of our islands. The evidence of failure is in our spare capacity generation, which is at an all-time and dangerous low of 1.2 per cent, according to National Grid. The evidence of failure is in the UK Government’s enormous subsidy for the untried and untested European pressurised reactor at Hinkley Point, and in the UK Government’s desperation in bribing the Chinese to invest in such a risky venture.
The solution to the problem and the way forward is to embrace the possibility of clean, green renewable energy generation. Scotland has the possibility of generating many times our own energy requirements, and the variety of storage solutions is limited only by our ingenuity and our extraordinary capabilities for technological innovation—something that we Scots have been good at for generations. There is no single magic bullet. Pumped storage, hydrogen, flywheels, ever cleverer and bigger batteries, compressed air, electric vehicles and other new and emerging technologies all offer exciting energy storage solutions.
There are a number of reasons why we must increase both our renewable energy generation and, in tandem, our storage capability. We need to do so to meet our climate change targets; we need to do so because, as world energy demand continues to rise, we need to increase our energy security; and we need to do so because we have a huge competitive advantage in these technologies and, therefore, a huge economic opportunity both at home, in capturing this enormous resource, and abroad, in exporting our skills and the technologies that we develop—technologies and skills in which we are already well ahead of the rest of the world.
The only missing ingredient in bringing all this to fruition is the lack of political will from the UK Government, which needs to recognise, as Tom Johnston did, that what is good for Scotland can also be good for the rest of the UK. As we consider our constitutional future, we must remember that the aim of constitutional change is the delivery of good government, and an essential part of good government lies in enabling us to capture our economic opportunities, especially in sectors such as energy in which we have a huge competitive advantage.
We have already stood by and watched as much of our oil wealth has been squandered. It would be a tragedy if we were forced to watch the same thing happen to our renewable energy opportunity.
17:12