Readers' Letters: Scottish and UK governments should grow up and work together
Scottish and UK governments need to stop messing about, says reader
I'm sure John Swinney is right in saying it is important to champion investment in Scotland and Scotland's produce abroad.
But his case is undermined by two separate visits to India by the Scottish and UK governments, both promoting Scotland. This is both an inefficient use (rather than a waste) of public money and risks being counter-productive in creating confusion and uncertainty around the political landscape among the target audience.
If both governments were genuinely wanting to champion economic growth, they would grow up, act like adults and work together for this outcome, making joint visits abroad. It's in both governments' interests to deliver growth and they both have levers to pull to contribute to that. Dysfunctional behaviour benefits no-one. Surely the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?
Andrew Anderson, Forfar, Angus
Irony lost
Something must really have troubled John Swinney about his most recent foreign travels to have led to him writing a double-page spread in The Scotsman to defend it (2 November).
As usual he seeks to make a point of Scotland not simply being “North Britain”. Perhaps the irony was lost on him, though, when he sat down with India’s Minister for Commerce and Industry with the backdrop of the Union Flag and the Tiranga of India as per your published image?
Paul Sewell, Peebles
Tangled web
The Scottish government is forever criticising the UK government. Well the chickens have well and truly come home to roost.
The Scottish government thought they just had to snap their fingers and they would get funding from the UK government for Scotland's proposed flagship Acorn carbon capture and storage project at St Fergus gas terminal near Peterhead (your report, 3 November).
As The Scotsman revealed, only £12 million will be provided as a grant to the developers, not the already promised £200m grant.
Scottish politicians set their net zero target for 2045 since “Scotland leads the world”. Many would say towards bankruptcy. No other country has pledged 2045. China has set its Net Zero target as “before 2060” but no date. India by 2070 and President Donald J Trump has put a huge question mark on USA Net Zero 2050 as he pledges "Drill, Baby, Drill".
Caroline Rance, head of campaigns at Friends of Earth Scotland, said over a year ago: “Carbon capture technology has 50 years of failure behind it, so businesses, workers and the public are being sold a lie about its role in their future.”
Looks like she was correct. What a tangled green web politicians weave.
Clark Cross, Linlithgow West Lothian
Think on
The heading, “Opportunity lost”, for my letter on Monday triggered a memory of the economics term “opportunity cost”, whereby limited funds being spent on one thing means it isn't available for something else that might have proved more beneficial.
That was alluded to by letter writer Iain Masterton on the same day, when he castigated all parties for allowing constraint payments to go to wind farms when they were forced to switch off due to lack of grid capacity. His choice was for the funds to go instead to desalination plants to produce potable water, as we see that particular resource being depleted in England.
On another page, writer Paul Wilson mentioned the “notable omission” from last week's budget of funding for the Acorn Project in Aberdeen, while the UK government energy minister defended that decision, saying it had been necessary to “reprioritise” budgets in favour of defence spending.
If anyone is still in doubt that strategic infrastructure spending decisions for Scotland would be better made in Scotland, they might want to rethink their position from scratch. Then, at least, we'd be in a better position to kick offending decision makers where it hurts, by removing them from positions of power.
Ian Waugh, Dumfries
Pure nonsense
William Loneskie (Letters, 3 November) excellently describes Scotland’s reluctance to use our vast natural resources. This is surely the modern version of our former restrictive licensing laws that forbade pubs opening on Sunday, and limited opening on weekdays, and this in a country with a vast drinks industry.
It’s just a modern version of our national penchant for making life as difficult and unpleasant as possible, and all for the better good of something else.
It was mere nonsense then, but a serious error today.
Malcolm Parkin, Kinnesswood, Kinross-shire
Drill wisely
Had William Loneskie (Letters, 3 November) properly read my previous letter he would have realised I was not “railing against extracting oil and gas from the North Sea”. What I was railing against was the apparent haste of some (whether naively or on behalf of vested interests) to exploit these diminishing resources as fast as possible without any comprehensive long-term energy strategy.
As someone who has spent much of his career working in the oil and gas sector, I am acutely aware of the continuing importance of the industry to Scotland in terms of employment and technical expertise, but if in ten years all of Scotland’s producible North Sea resources have been depleted (we’re already 90 per cent of the way there) where will the jobs and decades of acquired knowledge go without a serious long-term energy transition plan? It seems rather ironic that those who over a decade ago told us the oil would soon run out when Scots were considering independence now tell us there are plenty of reserves yet to be extracted from the continental shelf.
Just to be clear, there is another alternative to “drill, baby, drill” other than “don’t drill”. Drilling wisely according to a strategic energy plan that will increase, rather than simply sustain, good quality jobs and will raise, rather than simply maintain, the amount of worldwide expertise gathered in the North-east of Scotland, is that alternative.
Furthermore, with astute planning, as the rest of the world runs out of a still necessary resource for a host of different applications, Scotland can retain a level of energy security that, combined with an extensive renewable energy infrastructure, will lead visionary global energy policies cognisant of the importance of maintaining the health of our planet.
Stan Grodynski, Longniddry, East Lothian
Honest costs
The Chancellor says his budget “… kickstarts the long-term action required to get energy costs down for good”. If that is truly the object, a starting point might be more transparency about the cost of offshore wind, a technology in which Scotland plays a leading role, and which is too often presented as a route to cheaper electricity.
Offshore wind is routinely invoked as proof net zero can bring both cleaner power and lower bills. In Scotland, it is promoted as an opportunity of national significance, hailed as the “main driver” for new energy infrastructure such as SSEN’s Kintore to Tealing 400kV OHL. Yet the economics are less obliging than the public is led to believe. Gas-fired generation is generally accepted to have a capital cost of around £1 million per MW. Even conventional offshore wind is far more expensive than that, but floating wind belongs in another stratosphere. Equinor’s floating wind farm, Hywind Scotland, for example, is estimated at £8.8m per MW yet this much higher cost of floating wind is overlooked within offshore figures to give a rosier impression than the evidence justifies.
Offshore wind is treated as though more capacity must, by definition, mean lower prices. But if generation costs are this high and more than £70 billion is expected to be spent on the transmission infrastructure needed to connect offshore wind to the grid, how can consumers simply be asked to take it on trust that bills will fall? Those costs will not vanish. They will be borne by households and businesses in Scotland as elsewhere.
The budget promises: “Prioritising a cheaper energy mix and procuring new generation only where it lowers bills, benefits the system and can be accommodated by the grid.”
That is a sensible litmus test and should be applied with rigour to offshore wind in all its forms. Can new projects genuinely be shown to reduce costs once transmission, balancing and constraint costs are included? Can the grid absorb them without still more spending? These surely are crucial questions for a government serious about affordability.
The government’s own figures show gas no longer sets the wholesale electricity price as it once did. If that link is weak, yet electricity remains expensive, it becomes difficult to blame gas alone. Could the pressure on prices come from the cost of building, connecting and integrating offshore wind?
None of this is an argument against cleaner energy. But offshore wind, no less than any other major investment, should be judged by a simple standard: does it deliver reliable power at a cost the country can afford?
Until ministers can show how exorbitantly expensive offshore wind, coupled with £70bn of network investment, can yield cheaper electricity, the numbers look more like a cost moved from one side of the ledger to the other.
Eileen West, Banchory, Aberdeenshire
Write to The Scotsman
We welcome your thoughts – NO letters submitted elsewhere, please. Write to [email protected] including name, address and phone number – we won't print full details. Keep letters under 300 words, and in the body of the email – no attachments – and avoid 'Letters to the Editor/Readers’ Letters' or similar in your subject line. If referring to an article, include date, page number and heading. No poems.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.