Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 28 October 2020
We have all faced a dilemma before, and at times we may even have been tested by a trilemma, but how many of us have had to contend with a quadrilemma? That is the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s term for the puzzle that is our energy policy. The RSE says that it is crucial to strike a balance between a quartet of potentially competing concerns: climate change, security, affordability and acceptability. The RSE’s work, which has been two years in the making, has provided the springboard for our own committee inquiry. The two areas that we focus on are electric vehicles—or EVs, if you will—and local energy.
I will touch on a handful of the recommendations that we make under those headings, but first I will reflect on the RSE’s findings, as set out in its “Scotland’s Energy Future” report. The report breaks things down to the fundamentals—it asks where our energy comes from, how we use it and how responsible we are for what we consume. It works from the premise that we must reduce carbon emissions, and it considers the options that are open to us as policy makers and decision takers, the private sector and the public sector, and individuals and communities—in short, the nation as a whole.
The RSE acknowledges that the paradoxes of demand and supply present a profound challenge for any energy policy, however well put together. The “energy quadrilemma” is one way of looking at that challenge. As an example, what if workers in the oil and gas sector lose their jobs and find nothing to replace those jobs? That is the concern of the chair of the Economic Development Association Scotland. He says that the onus is on key, and often competing, players to come up with win-win scenarios and to learn to collaborate. He likens the situation to
“a Rubik’s cube of horizontal (energy), vertical (industrial) and spatial (regional) positions that must be managed, if not mastered, by Scottish policy makers.”
Given the complexity of the task—a quadrilemma, a Rubik’s cube and a whole-systems approach—we are sympathetic to the RSE’s call for an expert advisory commission. Such a body would cover all aspects of energy, including policy, economics and technology, and it would take an independent, continuous and—yes—whole-systems approach.
This is not the first time that the committee has considered the matter. In 2017, we reported on the draft energy strategy and asked whether a national agency was needed to oversee the transition of the energy system. We returned to the issue a year later, when we looked at the case for a publicly owned energy company, and now here we are again. Our recommendation is that a long-term strategic framework be put in place—a framework that is based on good governance, policy expertise, cross-party buy-in and long-term ownership, and which could include the establishment of an independent expert advisory commission on energy policy.
I am sorry to say that the Scottish Government’s response has been somewhat underwhelming. It points to the existing Scottish energy advisory board, a forum that, according to its own website, last met in June 2017. It undertakes to review its membership by the end of the year.