A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at a conference in Edinburgh entitled Powering Scotland, which took a serious look at whether or not the provisions are in place to keep the lights on over the next decade or so.
It was a heavyweight occasion backed by bodies such as Scottish Engineering, CBI Scotland and relevant trade unions. UK Energy Minister Mike O’Brien gave a feisty speech; but one person missing was his devolved counterpart, Jim Mather, who withdrew and sent a civil servant instead.
The reason for Mather’s reluctance to cross the road from Holyrood to Dynamic Earth was not difficult to discern. He deduced that the weight of informed opinion at the conference would not be to his liking. So the easy option was not to engage in the argument but simply to opt out.
For my own part, I don’t know if it is a boast or a confession that I gave much the same speech that I have been delivering at these events for quite a few years now, both when I was energy minister and subsequently.
My essential message has always been that we need a balanced energy policy if the three great imperatives are to be met: security of supply, affordability and carbon reduction. In other words, if we are going to keep the lights on at affordable cost in both financial and environmental terms, we need a bit of everything – nuclear, clean coal, gas, hydro and other renewables.
I have never felt, when delivering that message, that I was sharing some profound intellectual insight. Rather, it is a straightforward piece of commonsense that we should not put too many eggs in one basket because, as soon as we do, it will be at the expense of one of the three imperatives.
In the UK as a whole, the political consensus has finally moved in that direction. Crucially, the foolish prejudice against civil nuclear power has been abandoned because the seriousness of what is at stake has had to be recognised. Exactly the same thing is going on elsewhere, with Sweden the latest European country to reverse its “no nuclear new-build” position, with majority public support.
In Scotland, sadly, there is no such indication of progress towards a more rational energy policy, which is why Mather won’t even turn up to discuss the matter.
We have a first minister whose uninformed prejudice against nuclear power would better qualify him as president of the Flat Earth Society.
Alex Salmond runs an energy policy that is fuelled by sound bites and bloated claims. We are left with the ridiculous situation of Scottish-headquartered energy companies forming alliances with European partners to build nuclear power stations anywhere but in Scotland. The First Minister will have nobody else to blame when they cease to be Scottish-headquartered energy companies.
It is not because I am against renewables, but because I am so much in favour of them, that I find the Nationalist administration’s inflated claims about what they will deliver so offensive.
A case in point was the recent unremarkable announcement that the Scottish Government had rubber-stamped planning consent for a 4MW wave project off Siadar, in Lewis.
By the time Salmond’s spin doctors had got to work on it, this was the world’s biggest wave farm and all but the best informed listeners might have assumed that wave power on a serious scale is now just around the corner, which patently it is not.
The reason for exaggerating progress on renewables is straightforward. It is to encourage the pretence that Scotland can have both carbon reduction on the grand scale and also security of supply without retaining nuclear power, whereas the truth is that no such magic formula is available.
Salmond’s calculation is that this will not ultimately be provable one way or the other until he is drawing his pension. So, in the meantime, bluster will suffice.
Unfortunately, it is the next generation of Scots who will pay the price of his prejudices. The most likely alternative to a balanced energy policy that includes both nuclear and clean coal is not some glorious future in renewables, but the relegation of Scotland to the status of energy importer, probably relying on nuclear power from England.
Do we really want to end up like the Republic of Ireland, at the end of the line, importing what anyone else cares to send us and paying the highest energy prices in Europe?
That said, Ireland may yet have an energy ace to play – purportedly huge natural gas reserves out west in the Atlantic.
We also need to prepare for “clean coal” by insisting, whether at Longannet or Hunterston, that plants incorporate state-of-the-art technology and also are “carbon capture ready”, which is the most that anyone can offer anywhere in the world at present.
But 10 years from now, I am certain that carbon-capture technology will have developed to the point where we will be glad that enlightened people built “carbon capture ready” power stations a decade earlier.
All of these are serious issues that must be debated both individually and collectively. Scotland cannot opt out of that debate, and shutting down options on the basis of preconceived prejudices is an inadequate response to the challenges we face. Messrs Mather and Salmond should start engaging in that debate rather than avoiding it.
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