Seòmar agus comataidhean

I must put on the record that there has been significant progress on community energy.

The draft energy strategy and just transition plan has been published, but there are a number of things that we need to bottom out as a result of Supreme Court judgments, particularly those relating to oil and gas licensing. Oil and gas licensing is reserved to the UK Government, but people expect us to take a view on it.

There is no shortage of other energy policy documents that set out our ambition on all sorts of energy. The draft energy strategy has been published for the public, and I have also produced onshore and offshore wind statements and a hydrogen strategy. A great number of policy documents have been published already.

I cannot give an answer to the question about when the final energy strategy will be published.

I just want to say how much I welcome talking about all these issues with you, so I thank the committee for inviting me.

That is one of the areas in which things could move with regard to community benefit. If a developer comes into an area and has a wind farm development, it could work with the community to share the grid connection for a community energy scheme. That could be a welcome offer for communities.

Substantial developments have been waiting for a long time to get a grid connection. The developers might be told that the development will be connected by a certain time, and then a review is done—as it has been recently—and they will be told that it will actually be five or 10 years beyond what they were originally told. That means that community energy schemes, which generate small amounts of energy, are all the way at the back of the queue.

There will be ways and means in the exercise that I hope we will be able to undertake once—this is wishful thinking—community benefit is made mandatory. That could be one of the opportunities for communities to get a benefit that is not so much about having money on the table—it would certainly not be about having football strips for local primary schools, as important as those are—but involves facilitating communities to have their own community energy scheme that has access to the grid via a shared connection. I think that communities would be excited about those opportunities, for the reasons that you described.

I would just note that all the planning regulations that pertain to Scotland have been passed by this Parliament, and that the Parliament put through national planning framework 4. There are also the regulations associated with the Electricity Act 1989, which are in statute, too. Of course, there are also the statutory consultees and the views that they put in. All of that is taken into account by the reporter.

Robert Martin might be able to give you a little bit more legal background on how the reporter operates.

I thought that it would be helpful to bring all the petitions together. I am delighted to be here, as it is the first time that I have appeared before the committee.

These issues are matters of great importance to communities, which I completely understand. The petitions are largely about renewables and low-carbon energy, which represent a large economic opportunity, but they have to be managed in a way that brings people with them. I am serious about the fact that people need to see the benefits of energy developments in Scotland as much as possible. While I have been in post, first as energy minister and now as cabinet secretary, I have tried my best to ensure that we have all the levers, both reserved and devolved, to ensure that that is the case.

Investing in new energy generation and the grid to ensure that energy can securely get to where it is needed is essential for energy security. It is also essential to ensure that we capitalise on the low-carbon energy that Scotland is uniquely placed to generate. It will create thousands of jobs and many opportunities for Scottish businesses. Existing transmission upgrades are required and, to be honest, they are long overdue, because the transmission network is very old and will have been subject to various weather events, which are becoming more ferocious across Scotland. The transmission network can be unstable in places. Last week, during the snowstorms in the north-east and the Highlands, thankfully, there were very few outages and those that we had were short. Last year and the year before that, that was not the case.

Energy systems regulation is largely reserved to the United Kingdom Government. As such, there are issues on which I am only able to seek to influence the UK Government. I will outline those as I talk about the various petitions. I am aware that communities are concerned about the scale of development and the impact that some of those issues, such as battery storage, would have on them as householders. I am happy to talk about that and provide detail on what we are doing to look at some of the issues that have been raised with us.

It is important that we air and discuss all the themes that the petitions raise. I thank everyone who has gone to the trouble of raising a petition. I have had ministerial responsibility for the energy portfolio for three years and have been making the case to successive UK Governments that community benefits associated with developments must be mandatory and that developers’ engagement with communities must be much better and done earlier in the process. I would like there to be updated guidance that is mandated by the UK Government. There have been developments in that space in the past year or so with the new UK Government, which I am able to tell the committee about.

Recent changes that have been made to UK legislation will allow for the introduction of mandatory pre-application engagement and other improvements in the consenting process for large-scale applications. Our planning and consenting systems also ensure that the issues of cumulative impact and the impact on our natural environment will be considered in the decision-making process. Communities should share in our nation’s energy wealth. Last year, communities were offered £30 million a year in community benefits and we are providing support for them to invest in community energy projects through our community and renewable energy resource scheme—CARES. I have ensured that it is resourced to keep pace with the increasing demand for community energy. The ministerial code limits ministers’ ability to engage directly with communities about specific planning applications or developments that may become planning applications, but I am pleased to be able to answer general questions in the round. I look forward to answering the committee’s questions.

That was the result of a combination of a couple of things. There was powdery snow rather than the sort of snow that sticks to overhead transmission lines. I am giving my layman’s assessment, given that I was at the relevant Scottish Government resilience room meetings. There was also a lack of wind—on the whole, it was not particularly windy. Storm Arwen was particularly bad in causing outages because there was an unusual wind pattern that brought down trees in winter, when there would not normally have been wind coming from that particular direction. Trees grow to withstand the wind that they expect. Every day is a school day when you speak to people who deal with such outages. Storm Arwen caused a lot of tree fall, which brought down a lot of lines. On this occasion, there was mainly a particular type of snow and there were not the kinds of winds that would bring down power lines.

I do not really have a view. I want to hear the views of those who will be making those decisions and the views of the communities. One of the reasons why we went out to consultation was that we felt that the 50MW threshold was getting out of date, because there are more substantial developments than previously and the level might be too low.

Even anecdotally, there are a variety of views. Some councillors do not want that responsibility; they want the level to stay as is. We will hear from those people, but we will also hear from the councillors and the communities who want local decisions to be made locally. I do not really want to dictate through a consultation—that is not what consultations are for. I do not want there to be one offer; I want to know what people think. Do they think that the threshold should be 100MW, 75MW or the same as it is now? Once we have heard those views, we can have a full discussion on what is appropriate.

For projects under 50MW?

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