It doesn’t quite match Edinburgh Zoo’s two pandas in its enclosure, but All Energy will have two elephants in the room.
And they should be thoroughly examined in Aberdeen; not steered clear of for the sake of politeness.
To give them their full pedigree titles, they are Energy Market Reform and Scottish Independence Referendum.
Either individually or jointly, they have the capacity to consign all current assumptions about prospects for our renewables sector to a very large melting-pot.
And that is why they need to be addressed, realistically and expertly.
EMR is the more immediate because there is currently legislation at Westminster, surrounded by confusion – not a happy combination since either the Bill might be kicked into touch or else pushed through in a form that creates more questions than answers.
The entirely laudable goal of encouraging investment in all forms of low carbon energy through a stable pricing structure has turned into a nightmare of complexity.
For good measure, two civil servants who were among the few people in the world who understood the proposed reforms have recently jumped ship.
Yet the brutal truth is that renewables (except for traditional hydro) is a subsidy-driven industry and until there is certainty about what subsidy regime is going to prevail, nobody will be making investment decisions on the basis of hope and philanthropy.
As it currently stands, the Energy Reform Bill has been described as “a menu without prices”.
It is increasingly a cause for concern that the kind of pricing structure which would give certainty to both renewables and nuclear investors would also lock consumers into subsidising technologies that, 20 or 30 years from now may seem very far from cutting-edge.
Yet someone has to start filling in that menu very soon – or else tear it up and start again.
The Scottish Independence Referendum is still 15 months away, but it too has huge implications for Scotland’s renewables policy which cannot be ignored for much longer however much the Scottish Government insists that it would all be business as usual.
No matter how Scotland votes, they say, England will carry on buying our renewable energy. Well, maybe.
The key fact is that 90% of the subsidy to Scottish renewables, without which there would be little or no such industry, comes from consumers who live in what may, within a few years, be a foreign country.
The pretence that fracturing the United Kingdom does not also threaten the GB market in electricity is simply juvenile.
I have some personal interest in this matter since we constructed the “GB market” while I was energy minister a decade ago under Tony Blair, specifically for the purpose of sending Scottish renewables south. That made perfect sense in a UK, but becomes much less of a no-brainer if we in Scotland turn ourselves into a separate state and market.
This was spelled out by Ed Davey when he addressed the Scottish Renewables annual conference in March.
Scotland would, he said, have to compete with countries like Norway and Ireland to supply what’s left of the UK with renewables – not to mention France which can send London as much nuclear power as it needs, and is a lot closer than Shetland.
Interestingly, UK Secretary Davey recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with his counterpart in the Republic of Ireland specifically aimed at underpinning a massive wind-power investment in the Irish midlands, aimed at exporting five gigawatts of electricity to the UK.
There could hardly have been a clearer message to Scotland that alternatives do, and increasingly will, exist.
As a “Westminster politician”, Davey can be portrayed along with everyone else who dares point out the pitfalls of independence as “scaremongering”.
The interesting question is why Scottish Renewables, the trade body representing the industry’s interests, is not expressing its own views on this issue.
I consulted SR’s web-site this week and inserted the words “Scottish independence” to which the reply came: ‘Your search did not return any results”. How can this be? Whatever one’s view of independence, the one thing it cannot be to the Scottish renewables industry is irrelevant.
It is an accident of history that the referendum has come along at exactly the moment when Scotland is trying to build a whole new industry involving vast investment, largely paid for by exactly the same people from whom our political leaders are trying to secede.
If you were setting out to exemplify “high risk” for investors, then this might be what you came up with.
I fear that the silence of Scottish Renewables on the subject derives from this organisation being far too close to the Scottish Government, and to the sticks and carrots which Holyrood is none too subtle in utilising.
An industry that depends so heavily on subsidies and planning consents deems it prudent to keep its collective mouth shut.
That is why it is incumbent upon those who are neither politicians nor renewables companies to spell out with clarity the importance of these two issues; to share information on how they are already influencing and delaying investment decisions (which they are), and their potential for much greater impacts on the sector.
Time perhaps for the academics and analysts to step forward in Aberdeen – though they should bring their helmets with them since, whatever they say, there is bound to be plenty of political flak.
