Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 28 October 2020
I welcome the committee’s findings. I thank the clerks for their work, and all those who gave evidence.
Energy is a bit of a wicked policy area as it involves geopolitical, environmental and economic issues; legacy infrastructure; new technology; and, particularly in the Scottish context, an unsatisfactory mix of devolved and reserved powers.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh has already been cited; its report was a very helpful springboard, as the convener said. It highlights how interconnected this area of policy is to others such as transport, housing and climate. In his opening remarks, the convener mentioned Professor Little’s comment that it also requires a whole-systems approach.
I regret that we do not have more time to debate such a vital topic, but the inquiry revealed that some excellent work is happening on the ground. The committee visited the Alexander Dennis bus factory in Falkirk, and had a very inspiring visit to Orkney to look at the smart grid ReFLEX project, which I am sure Liam McArthur will say more about.
I want to focus on a few of the committee’s key findings. The first that struck me was the RSE’s recommendation of a reduction in energy consumption. We know that that is possible through modal shifts, and we also know that it is possible to build houses that consume no net energy. The RSE report makes it clear that that is the most effective way of tackling the quadrilemma.
The committee also makes the case for a national body to co-ordinate action on such things as decarbonisation, resilience, infrastructure and behaviour. I think that that will be a key issue, which the minister has already said something about in relation to his forward plans.
Electric vehicles was the second area that the committee was interested in. As an owner of an electric vehicle, I have a personal as well as a political interest in the subject. There is a growing number of such vehicles in Scotland. However, to tackle climate breakdown, we must push for them to be the default choice as soon as possible. As we discovered in Orkney, electric vehicles also play a critical role in smart grids as storage available to balance supply and demand in local grids. Modern technology exists to do that automatically, with automatic markets where consumers can buy and sell electricity.
As Mr Lindhurst was talking about Tacitus, I was observing on my smartphone a member of my family driving into Edinburgh. Electric vehicles, being electric and having computers at their heart, are at the core of the autonomy movement. Indeed, in Beijing, electric vehicles speak to traffic lights and traffic lights speak to electric vehicles to work out when it is best to let traffic through. Beijing also has systems that can prioritise public transport. It is therefore about more than just the energy question.
We heard from a number of witnesses that the EV charging network here remains something of a lottery. Even the new Electric A9 chargers are unreliable. I think that the minister said that they were world leading, but I used one recently that delivered two seconds of electricity before cutting out and displaying an error message, and such incidents are far too common.
The final element of the inquiry was local energy systems. It is regrettable, as others have said, that so much of Scotland’s renewable generation is controlled not by local co-operatives and businesses but by large corporations, including state-owned corporations of foreign Governments, such as Vattenfall from Sweden. For all that we like to compare ourselves with similar-sized European countries such as Denmark, the minister will know that the Heat Networks (Scotland) Bill is a reminder—certainly in my opinion—of how far we have to travel. For example, Denmark’s district heating schemes are the responsibility of the municipalities, which also own most of the pipe network, with consumer co-operatives owning the rest. In addition, all suppliers of heat must, by law, operate on a not-for-profit basis. In contrast, the proposed arrangements in Scotland exclude local authorities and are designed to attract investment from large corporates, and there is no not-for-profit requirement. What is normal in Denmark should be normal here.
The brief inquiry generated a lot of fascinating evidence and there is broad consensus among experts about how to proceed, but we have a long way to go before we have a properly integrated, long-term energy policy in place.
16:32