Meeting of the Parliament 10 February 2026 [Draft]
I welcome the opening of Finlay Carson’s motion, which recognises
“the essential role of renewables”.
As Mr Carson has described, Galloway has a long history of onshore, offshore and hydroelectric renewables. I know many people who are in the groups that Mr Carson mentioned, and they have had a fair amount of contact with me and my team over the past nine years.
In recent years, after decades of underinvestment in innovation and underappreciation of the climate emergency, we have seen Scotland blaze a trail in the move to net zero. We are innovating and developing at pace, even in agriculture; it is nothing short of a national transformation across our society. The cabinet secretary probably expects me to mention this, but we are seeing the deployment of commercial-scale and micro anaerobic digestion on our dairy farms and across the wider rural economy to help decarbonise the grid and support economic investment and new jobs, especially in the south-west of Scotland.
Renewables have to be part of the future. Remember that they are not only turbines; they include solar, biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric and, now, battery storage. We have seen that nuclear generation is simply a bottomless pit of public money with no end in sight and no limit to its costs for today’s citizens and for generations to come. Hinkley Point C had its nuclear site licence granted in 2012. It was first budgeted at £18 billion in construction costs; today, that figure tops £48 billion and will, no doubt, rise.