Our energy networks are owned by anyone except scotland

ScottishPower – which runs a large chunk of the electricity distribution network in Scotland – has reported increased profits on the back of its expansion of electricity infrastructure in Scotland.

Except, ScottishPower isn’t Scottish. It’s owned by Spanish energy giant Iberdrola. It’s they who posted the increased profits of €1.87 billion in the last quarter, with about a quarter of that coming from its Scottish operations.

We should note that these profits have come in before the price increases caused by Trump’s illegal war in Iran and actually offset reduced profits in Iberdrola’s retail electricity sales caused by reduced demand in electricity and in gas, as the world slowly moves away from fossil fuels and towards more efficient alternatives or to self-generation via solar panels.

Electricity distribution – the local networks that move electricity from the intra- and inter-country transmission networks to your home – is often considered a low-profit exercise. It’s the energy generators that make the real money in the supply chain (see BP’s massive profiteering off the back of the Iran war), but these results show that even the ‘low value’ parts of the chain are still massively profitable.

And those profits come from only two places. Either your energy bills or public subsidy from governments are trying to encourage companies to transition us away from an energy system based on burning fossil fuels in large, centralised power plants to a more distributed system of renewable energy generators placed wherever the energy is best captured (see Craig’s recent interview on the Scottish Independence Podcast for more on that topic).

As a result of the hitching of our vital energy network infrastructure to the private sector, half a billion pounds have been taken from your bills or our collective public budget and have been removed from Scotland and given over to a Spanish corporation to distribute to its shareholders. Those shareholders include, as its “Top Five”, US equity giant BlackRock, the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, US equity giant Vanguard Group, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, and the Dubai sovereign wealth fund. None of these shareholders is based in Scotland either.

Once again, we see Scotland being essentially leached of our wealth because we don’t own or properly invest in our own critical infrastructure.

There are things that Scotland could be doing. In the short term, the Scottish Government should ensure that any grants it hands to energy companies should be done by buying equity in those companies so that it can receive a direct return on the investments (this is something that we’ve advocated that the Scottish National Investment Bank should be doing more of) but longer term, the Scottish Government simply has to bring the entire energy sector in Scotland back into public hands (here’s how it can be done within the powers of devolution). What would Scotland look like if we started reinvesting that half-billion that has been extracted in the last quarter back into Scotland? Plus, the rest that has been extracted at every step along the way from offshore wind turbine to your socket?

Scotland is an energy-rich nation, but the choices being made by our governments to give that wealth to just about anyone else but Scotland mean that we never feel the benefit of that wealth and, in fact, end up paying out of our pockets just to keep the lights on.