Meeting of the Parliament 27 May 2025
I welcome today’s debate because the issue of community energy is a crucial one for us to debate. As a Labour and Co-operative member, I am proud to be a member of the Edinburgh Community Solar Co-operative. I will come back to that later.
The debate is not just nice to have; it is absolutely key that we maximise our fantastic land, wind and water resources to the benefit of communities. Moreover, this is about empowering our local communities, and should also be about creating local jobs and investment, and delivering community wealth building. If we get it right—if we have effective planning—we will, potentially, also tackle our nature and climate emergencies. The issue is absolutely crucial.
I welcome the fact that the Scottish Government will support our Scottish Labour amendment. I constructed it as an add-on amendment. My aim is to be constructive, although, if members read our amendment, they will understand that it is about our need to go much further. I will focus on that today.
So much more needs to be done—and can be done—to ensure that more community-owned, co-operatively owned and municipally owned projects can be delivered. I totally agree with the point that Douglas Lumsden made about the huge amount of time that it takes for individual communities to do the work. It is not just a commitment of a year or two. Getting a project through is a commitment lasting years: the community needs to work up the financial and investment side, get the project through planning, and then run it. It is a huge commitment.
We should not underestimate the challenge for local authorities, because they have had lots of cuts to their funding and they do not have the necessary dedicated staff. We need to learn from successes in areas in Scotland where community projects have been owned by authorities, so that we can spread that approach through working with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and individual local authorities. The geography of our local authorities in Scotland means that they all have opportunities, but there are risks that need to be assessed, investment is needed and officers need skills. We need to share more. That is why I mention working with CARES, and what more Co-operative Development Scotland could do to share best practice. There is much that needs to be done.
One reason why we need to focus on why community energy has to happen relates to the discussion about having a joined-up approach. At the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee last month, we discussed constraint payments. Last year, £393 million was paid in such payments—when we had to turn wind farm turbines off—98 per cent of which was as a result of wind turbines in Scotland. We need to use that electricity now. We need to think about creating local power but we also need to think about how we use that power. For example, we could power electric vehicles, buses and trains.