Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 28 October 2020
The Economy, Energy and Fair Work Committee’s energy inquiry is based on the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s “Scotland’s Energy Future” report. The committee also considered electric vehicle infrastructure and locally owned energy. If anything, that tells us about the complexity of our energy systems from generation right through to supply to the customer.
We know that we need to decarbonise and that we need to take industry, communities and customers with us. A just transition is about not just the workforce but customers. The costs of various schemes are included in consumers’ bills. Unfortunately, it is only those with resources who can access schemes to insulate their houses and install microrenewables. Those in fuel poverty cannot afford to do that, but they still have to pay towards the schemes. I am not against the schemes, but I am concerned about the unfair distribution of funds and the inability to use them to tackle fuel poverty. That is why I am keen that, as we scrutinise the Heat Networks (Scotland) Bill, we ensure that tackling fuel poverty is at its heart. Ombudsman Services tells us that
“to achieve a just transition to net zero, we need confident, engaged and empowered consumers. Decarbonising our economy will require a high level of trust from consumers”.
I cannot speak of a just transition without speaking about the lack of a just transition for our workforce. We are home to some of the best renewable energy in the world, yet where are the jobs? BiFab workers in Fife and on Lewis are seeing their futures disappear, while multinational companies line their pockets from our natural resources. That is simply not right, and I call on the Scottish Government to put it right. The actions of a Government should never lead to the decimation of an industry. On Lewis, the community is clear that it wants to cut loose from BiFab—a company in which the Scottish Government is a shareholder—because it believes that it can do a better job in attracting work to the island. Frankly, I cannot see how it could do a worse one.
We must also encourage community generation, and that is why communities must be at the heart of the Heat Networks (Scotland) Bill. However, we cannot simply impose solutions on communities without buy-in.
This is all interconnected. I will use an example from my own region. The subsea cable from Skye to Harris has broken down, and that means a return to using the old diesel-powered generator to provide electricity for the islands. Because that connection is down, the renewable energy that is generated on the island cannot be distributed. That means that clean energy is going to waste while fossil fuels are being used to generate electricity. That has a knock-on impact for many of the small-scale community generators that feed into the system, because they no longer have a market for their clean energy.
For many years, I have been pushing for an interconnector to those islands, which would have distributed energy, had it been built. The campaign will go on, while a new cable is laid to replace the damaged cable. That just shows just how disorganised our system is. Surely the replacement cable should provide additional capacity, and surely there should have been a better back-up than a diesel-powered station from the last century—yet that is what serves us.
Someone once told me that our distribution network is pretty much as good as wet cotton strung between poles; it certainly cannot cope with Scotland’s potential for renewables. It also seems that we cannot harness—