Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 17 May 2022
Few places have as much potential to contribute to Scotland’s carbon reduction efforts as our island communities. Peatland and some types of sea bed are carbon sinks on a vast scale. Peat layers have been shown to be able to store up to 25 times more carbon than trees, while coastal ecosystems can sequester up to 20 times more carbon per acre than land forests. Although increased tree planting is important in the right locations, it is probably accepted that ploughing up peatland for commercial forestation would, in most cases, release far more carbon dioxide than it could ever then recapture.
On the potential to generate electricity from renewable sources, the options in Scotland’s islands are literally incalculable. Island-based wind power could make a significant contribution to decarbonisation of the electricity grid in Scotland. However, major commercial developments in my constituency become possible only if the UK agency, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, eventually gets round to authorising the cable to export power to the mainland.
To make all such projects more commercially viable, the UK Government needs to rip up the antiquated rules on transmission charging that mean that the further north a project is, the more it pays to be connected to the national grid. That principle shows scant regard for the places where renewables potential lies. It is impossible even to begin to call that fair.
The enormous potential of the offshore wind power that is now being planned out to the west and north of my constituency, as a result of the recent ScotWind licensing round by the Scottish Government and Crown Estate Scotland, presents the prospect of renewables generation on a totally new scale. The cable from a number of those developments should make landfall in the Western Isles.
Tidal energy is being exploited on a large scale near a number of other island communities. I make the case for Scotland to look again at wave power as a potential source of energy—of which there is no shortage in my constituency.
There is a conspicuous tension, to which other members have pointed during the debate, between all the renewables potential and the reality of fuel poverty in many island communities. In my constituency, 40 per cent of households are classified as being fuel poor, which is almost double the Scottish average and is certainly one of the highest levels in all of Europe.
Being off the gas grid, island communities find themselves uncommonly dependent on heating oil, which is being bought at a price that has doubled in recent months, as I have already mentioned, in a market that the UK Government stubbornly declines to regulate. That means that, despite the considerable efforts of the Scottish Government on many fronts, fuel poverty in many islands is set to reach unprecedented and intolerable levels this winter.