Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 03 December 2020
I echo Edward Mountain’s comment. As a non-committee member, one can feel a little like an interloper, especially on a subject such as this. I would say, however, that any debate that can take one from the poet Horace to skiing in Siberia is worthy of every member’s consideration.
This area is of interest to me. One of the great privileges of this job is that we get introduced to areas with which we had perhaps not been familiar but which become very important and interesting to us. I am certainly very thankful to David Somervell and Transition Edinburgh who, early on in this parliamentary session, invited me to a briefing that outlined the early progress that the University of Edinburgh had made in developing heat networks.
As members may or may not know, the University of Edinburgh has three combined heat and power pumps across its campus, the first of which was installed in 2000. In basic terms, they have been able to improve the university’s energy efficiency by more than a third, partly through the more efficient use of heat from power generation but also through the reduction of power loss by having power generated immediately next to where it is consumed. That has generated savings in excess of £1.5 million a year for the university.
That is not the only such scheme in or close to my constituency. Slateford Green, which is a housing association development of 60 flats in my constituency that was developed in 2000, had a heat network built as part of it. Tynecastle school, which is just outside my constituency, is heated using waste energy from the Caledonian brewery, which is much in line with the distillery schemes that Edward Mountain alluded to.
Despite the progress that we have had in Scotland and the benefits that have been outlined, heat networks provide only 1 per cent of Scotland’s heating. It is imperative that we do better and that we improve our ability to heat our homes in an energy-efficient way. Quite simply, as Andy Wightman pointed out, Scotland is cold. The fact that CO2 emissions from heating our homes are a quarter of our total emissions, as Claudia Beamish set out, is something that we have to tackle.
The improvements that we gain from efficiencies decline, so we need investment and infrastructure if we are going to remove gas boilers from our homes. In our cities in particular, heat networks can be an incredibly valuable part of that. The bill is therefore welcome. It provides a framework for the construction and running of heat networks, and it is a necessary starting point.
As has already been said, there is concern that the bill is permissive rather than enabling. I was encouraged by the minister setting out the range of other measures that the Scottish Government is seeking to take forward so that the bill is not simply a single shot but is part of a suite of initiatives. However, we need to go further.
If the University of Edinburgh example points to anything, it is that efficiency and carbon neutrality can go hand in hand in addressing fuel poverty. It is clear that, if savings of a third can be passed down to all consumers and communities, that will be advantageous as we seek to tackle fuel poverty.
The committee convener’s contribution was remarkable for a great number of reasons. Not least, I was struck by his conversion to municipal socialism. The example of Denmark and the way in which such schemes work in Scandinavian countries is important. We do not want large corporate investment that does not pass on benefits to our communities. The schemes work best when they are owned and controlled by local communities.