Seòmar agus comataidhean

The change was put in train a few months ago. We have been consulting on the good practice principles associated with applications. This is the case that I made: having the responsibility for consents put me in a situation in which I felt that I needed to be able to divorce the policies associated with energy from the eventual decisions, so it was best for the planning minister to have responsibility for consents. In that way, I could be confident that there could be no perception of my having been influenced. It is important that that is understood by communities that have concerns.

I will give a hypothetical example. A community group in the Western Isles might have concerns about project X and want to speak to me as part of the community engagement associated with the project. If, at the end of the process, consent was not given to the project, the applicant could say that I was swayed by my meeting with that community group—there could be the perception that I was influenced by that group. I do not want anything like that to happen. That could be the case when something was consented to or when something was not consented to—it works both ways. I want to ensure that I can engage with every stakeholder, in line with the good practice principles on community engagement.

I was confident that the UK Government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill would give us the power to mandate community engagement, but I had the sense that it would be difficult for me to carry out that engagement as fully as I wanted to. Thankfully, I reached an agreement with the planning minister that he would take on responsibility for the energy consents unit, and the First Minister agreed that I needed to be able to fully engage on all the good practice principles and the developments that the Planning and Infrastructure Bill would allow us to take forward.

I thank Maurice Golden for setting out the landscape. It is important to be aware of the different roles and the many different players. There are reserved responsibilities associated with transmission in particular. The Electricity Act 1989 is the governing legislation around all the regulations associated with consenting. The Scottish Government’s energy consents unit must conform to everything in the 1989 act. NESO has responsibility for what the transmission network looks like, and must look like, in order to facilitate the getting of the electricity to all the places where it needs to go throughout the whole of the UK.

The previous UK Government worked with NESO, and it has issued its plans for upgrading the transmission infrastructure. Regarding the role of the Scottish Government, ministers have the final consents, once developments have been through the whole process, which is regulated at UK level—although we have planning powers. Any developments over 50MW currently go to the energy consents unit in the Scottish Government; anything under 50MW is decided at local authority level by councillors and the authority. We are currently consulting on changing that threshold—to see what people think about changing it to give more responsibility to councils up to a level beyond 50MW.

We have some of the most stringent environmental conditions in Scotland. A series of documents and assessments must be submitted in applications to the energy consents unit. We do not dictate and cannot dictate to an applicant what the engineering solutions are for their application. Indeed, nowhere in the UK dictates that.

The ECU assesses the application as submitted. Let us say that those in charge of project X want power transmission lines. They have set out the engineering solution that they have found, and they have determined how and where they want to site those lines. We will assess that application as written. We will not dictate in advance that things have to be done in a particular way. It is for them to make an assessment and submit all the documentation associated with environmental impact assessments. That will then go out to all the statutory consultees, which includes local councils. Even if the development is over 50MW and comes to the ECU, local authorities will still be a statutory consultee. If local authorities do not agree with the application as written, it will automatically go to a public inquiry.

If the application goes through the energy consents unit, it will assess all the documentation, assessments and plans that are supplied by the applicant, and then, in accordance with all the regulations and the Electricity Act 1989, it will advise the minister who is making the final determination, with an assessment of what all the statutory consultees have said. It is important to realise that the minister who is looking at that advice can go back to their officials and question certain things, such as, for example, “Why are you giving me this advice when this has happened?”

The minister has to be certain that, when they make a determination, they are not going against any legal advice because, if they do, it might give them an opportunity to turn something down, for example. If officials have given the minister advice to consent to something and all the reasons why, and the minister says, “Nah—I don’t like it,” they need to be certain that they are on solid ground legally, because the decision might be appealed and taken to court.

That is the process and it is very rigorous. Many developers say that we take too long to make determinations. We try our best and we have doubled the capacity of people working in the ECU to streamline the process. That is good for developers, but it is also good for communities, because they get a quicker decision, they know what they are dealing with and it does not drag on for years.

I will get that information—I do not have the tables with all those figures in front of me. We will produce information for the past few years—

For projects under 50MW?

I would have to look back at that. In my time as energy minister—Dr Allan then became the energy minister when I became cabinet secretary—I cannot recall calling in a decision that had been made by a local authority.

Every point that Fergus Ewing has just made I have absolute sympathy with. That is why we have asked NESO to do the strategic planning work that I mentioned in response to Maurice Golden. The assessment that it will undertake will give us that detail. It is all about energy security.

On constraint payments, I think that they are an absolute scandal, to be honest, and they are one of the reasons why we need to improve capacity in the grid. Why are we paying developers to stop generating? Most people in Scotland will find it absolutely unbelievable that that is the case. That energy—that electricity—has nowhere to go, and the grid upgrades will allow more of it to go into the grid and to be used.

There are also opportunities for more local offtakers to take that electricity, too, and the Scottish Government has been looking at heat networks—the work that Màiri McAllan is doing—and at the high-intensity industries that we are trying to encourage to come to Scotland, as part of the work that Kate Forbes is doing with the green industrial strategy.

The work that we have asked NESO to do will be absolutely fundamental to how we go forward. We need to ascertain where the energy security and resilience weak spots are and plan accordingly, and that very important work needs to be done to inform what we, in turn, will do. That future strategic spatial energy plan is, in effect, what we have commissioned NESO to do, and it will allow us to ascertain exactly where the weak spots are in the Scottish grid and in energy generation. We can then plan on that basis with the expert advice that it will supply us with.

I am not here to answer for Ed Miliband. Upgrading the grid infrastructure has actually been the policy of successive UK Governments—it was the previous Government that put in place grid infrastructure upgrades. I take the point that everything like this takes a very long time, but the time to start is now.

SEPA is doing a bit of work on that at the moment. I was interested to see the petition come through, so I reached out to SEPA, which has a working group that is dedicated to pump storage hydro. It is exploring all the challenges that are associated with pump storage hydro and the interaction with watercourses and whether there would be loss or whatever. The group is also looking at the cumulative impacts and at the lack of formal co-ordination agreements for developers who are working on the same body of water. It is also looking at the impact of pump storage hydro on fish more generally, which includes the subject of the petition.

SEPA is developing guidance on the consideration of the cumulative impacts, and I believe that it will consult externally on that. I do not know whether it is doing that yet, but I can find out when it will. That will give the people who lodged the petition and people who are interested in the issue an opportunity to engage in the consultation and to provide their knowledge of the impacts that pump storage hydro is having.

We will reach out to SEPA and, as and when any information becomes available, we will pass that on to the committee.

I do not agree that nothing has been happening. There is high demand for grants, loans and associated assistance under the community and renewable energy scheme.

When I first met the UK Government’s energy minister once he had come into post, he talked about the UK Government’s local power plan, and I expressly said to him that he should not reinvent the wheel, because we want to expand the capacity of community and renewable energy, given that demand is so high. I am pleased to say that, off the back of that, I was able to secure funding to augment the capacity of Community Energy Scotland through GB Energy. Funding has come straight to CARES via the Scottish Government. The budget, which was announced yesterday, also includes commitments on community energy.

I have also done work relating to repowering opportunities on publicly owned land. We have put in place a scheme that will, in effect, give communities priority in applying for repowering opportunities, which will involve work through CARES. That was not the case previously.

On Fergus Ewing’s general point, developers working with communities to facilitate more community energy is exactly what I want to see happening. I do not want it just to be a case of there being an offer of money on the table, with the message being, “Do with it what you will.”

For communities that want to leverage private finance in order to have a community energy scheme, I agree with Fergus Ewing that there is exciting potential around mandating community benefits, but there is nothing preventing developers from doing that, on a voluntary basis, at the moment. Some developers have done that, but I want to see more of it. I do not know whether every community will want to do that, but the whole point is that it is up to them. That goes back to Jackson Carlaw’s point that communities should be able to decide how they utilise the community benefits.

However, there is no shortage of demand for community energy projects. I am trying my level best to give communities more opportunities to own their own energy. We have set out the repowering opportunities for Forestry and Land Scotland, although I do not have them in front of me. There are a number of such opportunities. I have actively said that community energy schemes should take priority in applications for repowering opportunities, and CARES will assist communities in that regard.