The author is chief of the Scottish Labour celebration
Scotland is on the cusp of an offshore vitality revolution — regardless of each the Scottish Nationwide celebration and the Conservatives’ finest makes an attempt to squander it.
Nowhere is that this missed potential clearer than within the case of ScotWind. The seabed leasing mission has already given firms the rights to develop as much as 25 gigawatts of energy off Scotland’s coasts and to construct among the greatest floating wind farms on the planet.
Whereas these are welcome developments, they fail to benefit from Scotland’s potential as a result of the general public has not been given a direct stake. Licences offered cheaply to overseas firms (themselves typically state-owned) and weak procurement phrases imply the SNP authorities has fairly actually left cash and jobs on the desk.
We’re within the ludicrous place the place Vattenfall — a publicly owned firm in Sweden — will revenue extra from wind farms off our coast than taxpayers in Scotland.
This isn’t the one instance of a wasted alternative. The SNP promised the nation a nationwide vitality firm — this has now been scrapped. A nationalist dedication to 130,000 inexperienced vitality jobs that will flip Scotland into “the Saudi Arabia of renewables” has vanished like a mirage.
The failure to reform planning legal guidelines leaves shovel-ready renewable tasks languishing, whereas the 2 governments in Holyrood and in Westminster surprise aloud about how you can put together for a simply transition from fossil fuels, together with within the North Sea. Geography has surrounded the nation with the means to generate inexperienced energy, populated by folks with concepts to make it occur. We’d like change to ensure Scottish companies and customers reap the advantages of vitality manufacturing on our shores.
Keir Starmer has dedicated to the creation of Nice British Power — a brand new publicly owned producing firm — within the first 12 months of a Labour authorities. GB Power would rework the UK, and Scotland inside it, into an vitality superpower. It’s going to harness the facility of Scotland’s wind and waves (and sure, some solar) to create lots of of hundreds of jobs by 2030, lower vitality payments and ship vitality safety for our nation. It might change lives and ship on web zero targets.
Take ferries, for instance. The SNP managed to show the development of two new ferries for Scotland’s state-owned Scottish ferry operator from just a little native problem into a global image of bungled procurement. Among the many more unusual selections was the selection to make the 2 ferries, already 5 years overdue and tens of millions of kilos over price range, run on liquid pure fuel and diesel. LNG is the Betamax video of ferry fuels — the flawed reply that results in a technological useless finish and won’t energy the long run.
On one other western seaboard, in San Francisco Bay, a brand new fossil-free ferry, powered by hydrogen gas cells, is being trialled. In Norway, all the time an vital comparator for oil-rich Scotland, two hydrogen-fuelled ferries are deliberate for 2025 which is able to use 85 per cent inexperienced energy. Nearer to dwelling, Caledonian Maritime Belongings, the state-owned ferry supplier, is concerned in a mission in Orkney to develop a small, inter-island ferry propelled by carbon-neutral hydrogen gas. It’s predicted that inside a decade, most ship visitors will transfer utilizing this type of gas.
These developments counsel that we must always use the wind energy from across the coast of Scotland to supply clear gas to energy our ferries, container ships and far else moreover. Hitting the UK’s 10GW goal for inexperienced hydrogen by 2030 would make the UK a world chief, offering clear storable energy, decarbonising our industries and making certain a safe provide.
For greater than a decade, in relation to capitalising on Scotland’s vitality assets, we’ve got had ministers in each Edinburgh and London who haven’t made good on their guarantees. It’s time to cease squandering our potential for producing inexperienced energy and the high-skilled jobs that go along with it.
