Too much renewable energy? Or too little power?

The lead story in The National today is on the march of renewable energy through Scotland and the negative feeling being generated in communities because of it. (This story is part of the paper’s “Energy Week” and you should look out for Common Weal’s own contributions in it in the coming days).

In a sense, the question is on to something. Despite our size and vast potential for energy resources, Scotland is relatively sparsely populated and recent trends towards energy efficiency (and deindustrialisation) place a limit on the total demand for energy in the country. There are already enough consented energy projects to meet Scotland’s reasonable energy demands – more than enough if we include offshore projects like ScotWind that could power the whole of Scotland several times over.

Knowing this, it can be galling for local communities to be told that yet another private developer has put in an application for yet another renewable project in there area right after they either successfully argued against the last one or were told that the last one would be the last one.

It may be though that it’s not the fact of there being too much renewable energy that is the problem but the fact that communities have too little power.

Local power to shape and influence renewable developments can be essentially non-existant. Influence relies on a strong sense of local democracy in a country where we don’t have any real local democracy and the developers of projects can rely on communities having to scrabble to act with little time and fewer resources while they know that they can simply flood the zone with applications and they only need to get lucky once. And they will get lucky more than once because even when projects are refused locally, those planning decisions can and often are overruled by Ministers or Minister simply bypass local government from the start.

And worse, the communities pay the price of hosting the projects but scarcely receive any benefit from them. Even the Scottish Government’s recent update to minimum recommended “community benefit” payments is still a pittance compared to what the community would receive in revenue if they were allowed to publicly own their own renewable generators.

The reasons why Scotland is in this situation are simple and are entirely political. The Scottish Government has refused to enable public ownership of energy on any kind of scale that might threaten private energy profits. The Scottish Government has also utterly beholden itself to the altar of “inwards investment”, which means that the vast majority of Scotland’s energy wealth will be exported to foreign public energy companies and to multi-national corporations and private equity firms.

Fault also lies with the UK Government. As mentioned, part of the reason that Scotland might now have “too much” energy is because of decades of deindustrialisation which, in part, is due to the UK’s energy pricing scheme which was designed to incentivise coal power stations to be built near (but not too near) London. “Zonal Pricing” would reduce energy costs for communities living in the shadow of wind turbines, would encourage the location or relocation of energy intensive industries nearer to Scotland’s energy resources and would greatly reduce the need to build transmission lines that are currently needed to take Scottish energy to industries based in the south of England. The UK Government decided against such Zonal Pricing on the grounds that it would “create a postcode lottery of energy prices”, when what they actually meant was that they were in favour of the current energy lottery that means Scottish consumers pay some of the highest energy rates in the UK while consumers in London pay some of the least.

Finally, and back in the Scottish Government’s court, there is a sheer lack of strategic planning. Common Weal argued for the creation of a Scottish Energy Development Agency that would assess Scotland’s energy demands against our energy resources and would plan for where future developments would be constructed to best meet that demand. This policy was overwhelmingly accepted by SNP conference members in 2019 but was entirely ignored by the Scottish Government in favour of their own plan of simply allowing developers to ride roughshod over the country making private deals from which they will extract massive profits at the expense of virtually everyone else.

With elections looming and the climate emergency making ever greater demands on our need for a just and green transition, it is absolutely vital – as we said in our Common Home Plan – that the public is brought along with the policies otherwise they will fail. Common Weal has consistently won the arguments for that kind of transition both in public and at political party conferences for many years now. There is no excuse for Governments to keep ignoring not just us, but also their own members.

It is debatable whether or not Scotland has too much renewable energy but we certainly have too little power to make a difference in that debate. For Scotland’s energy to start working for All of Us, that must change.