Unspecified “security concerns” means scotland losing out on energy again

Over the past couple of months, there has been a high profile fight happening between the Scottish and UK Governments over a proposed Chinese-owned wind turbine factory that could have been built in the Highlands. It would have been the largest wind turbine factory in the UK.

However, the fight over the plant was won by the UK Government citing, without publishing public evidence, “security concerns” over the company.

The UK Government apparently offered John Swinney a “top secret briefing” where the UK’s “security concerns” would be outlined to him, and him alone. It is not known if Swinney took up that offer but if he has, he hasn’t published his own account of what was in it.

It is very possible that these concerns exist, but as we have written about elsewhere, this plant appears to be a very poor candidate to be running secret operations and economic security arguments that the plant would outcompete domestic wind turbine production falls over when one simply asks “What domestic wind turbine production?”, never mind start investigating Chinese ownership in other and arguably much more security sensitive parts of the UK energy sector like nuclear plants.

Nor do we see the same level of security scrutiny being applied to companies linked to other hostile or unstable governments. Given that we now live in a world where the US Government could be spying against its allies or could theoretically lock our MSPs out of the ability to vote in Parliament on a whim, a security conscious nation may wish to look at the ties the US Government has to other companies in Britain too.

Now, we see news that Ming Yang, the company behind the wind turbine factory proposal, is courting Spain to host its factory instead almost certainly meaning that Scotland will end up importing finished products for foreign owned energy companies instead of building our own capacity here.

Even if the Ming Yang plant wouldn’t itself be Scottish-owned, and we would certainly argue against handing them the contract if it meant crowding out an equivalently-sized Scottish producer, the nascent state of Scotland’s actual energy production capacity means that we desperately need bootstrapping strategies to rapidly build up not just the manufacturing capacity in terms of plant and production output but also in terms of jobs and skills. 1,500 workers trained to a high degree become an excellent pool from which some of them can move into other growing companies or to start their own.

The Scottish Government has the opportunity, as we’ve laid out in detail, to invest in a domestic energy revolution that within a few decades would bring all of Scotland’s energy production into Scottish public ownership. To do this effectively, we need to start building up the manufacturing and servicing sector to make it happen. We also need to do this within the context of an increasingly urgent climate emergency and the lack of previous action that has caused us to fall badly behind on climate targets.

To meet all of those goals quickly will require shortcuts in the form of hiring in companies to build factories for us. Not doing any of this means that Scotland will simply be told to be content with being a country from which others extract wealth rather than one that builds it up here.

It’s clear which one the UK Government would prefer. The question for the new Scottish Parliament now is: Does the Scottish Government agree with them?