One definite thing that can be said about Great British Energy is that it has a website.
Oh, and that it is being set up by Ed Miliband. And that its early promotion emphasised security, specifically protection against Putin’s weaponisation of energy.
The rest of what we know so far amount to claims, statements of intent, and indications about how it will work which raise further questions.
It’s said that GBE will create 69,000 jobs in Scotland and cut energy bills for good (claiming a reduction of £300 per annum by 2030). A budget of £8.3 billion is to be allocated over the duration of the current parliament.
According to the initial draft legislation recently presented to MPs at Westminster, GBE’s objects are ‘facilitating, encouraging and participating in the production, distribution, storage and supply of clean energy; the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from energy produced from fossil fuels; improvements in energy efficiency; and measures for ensuring the security of the supply of energy’.
There's a unspecific commitment for GBE’s headquarters to be in Scotland – the transparent political intent here is to evidence the benefits of our country being an integral part of the unionist state, whilst the determining role of UK governance structures is confirmed by the fact that Miliband will merely be obliged to ‘consult’ with Scottish Ministers if anything ‘concerns a subject matter provision about which would be within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament if contained in an act of that Parliament’.
Dumfries and Galloway Council are amongst those who've been quick to invite Miliband to consult with them. Why not, they say, base GB Energy at Chapelcross near Annan, the site of an old Magnox nuclear power station now undergoing decommissioning?
However the plans for GBE unfold, the resulting initiatives sit within an evolving set of issues, policy questions and problems to do with energy generation in Scotland.
One controversial issue – likely to become more controversial – relates to the ‘march of the pylons’: work is expected soon to begin on a ‘superhighway’ of infrastructure which will channel green electricity from Scotland’s rich renewable resources to the north of England, and will stretch over 300 miles under the North Sea and on land. The high voltage cables of the ‘Eastern Green Link’ will stand in Scottish countryside, but the power they generate will serve consumers south of the border (and the profits of the private companies who own the infrastructure). Electricity generated in Scotland will be exported again, even as prices here remain high. There’s been consultation – but this is an initiative that looks set to provoke different forms and levels of conflict at local community level and nationally (providing an opportunity for nationalists in campaigning mode to raise the question of whether Scotland is getting a fair deal from the arrangements – and to be criticised for not having achieved such a deal when in governing mode at Holyrood).
Meanwhile, and more generally, the implications of the shift from the SNP-Scottish Greens Bute House Agreement to the Swinney-Forbes-led minority SNP government for policy on net zero and the push towards a ‘just transition’ have not yet become apparent.
Uncertainty and anxiety continue for the workers at Grangemouth, where 500 jobs are under threat because of proposals to close Scotland's last remaining oil refinery and turn the huge industrial instead plant into an oil import depot. Such extensive job losses would not amount to any kind of contribution towards a ‘just transition’. Furthermore, there’s no suggestion that the end of oil refining in Scotland would form part of an environmentally-necessary move away from carbon-consumption. The processing would just be moved to England.
That’s why Derek Thomson, the Scottish Secretary of Unite, is talking up the ‘growing belief that the future of Grangemouth refinery workers and thousands more in the supply chain can be secured with government support’. The trade union is ‘actively engaging’ the plant’s owners (Petroineos) and the new ministers in the UK government in an effort to explore how the refinery’s operations can be extended while low carbon projects are accelerated at the complex.
Meanwhile, a worrying situation at the Torness nuclear power station, thirty miles east of Edinburgh near Dunbar ... There are 46 cracks in the ageing nuclear reactor – and it is the official Office for Nuclear Regulation which has previously said that ‘spreading cracks could result in debris inhibiting the cooling of hot radioactive fuel. This can lead to a reactor meltdown, which can result in the escape of radioactivity to the environment’.
In spite of this, the plant’s operators (EDF Energy, part owned by the French state) are committed to prolonging the reactor’s life. Torness began generation in 1988 and is now planned to continue until 2028.
Even if the calls of campaigners concerned about the threat to public safety were heeded, and the plant closed down sooner rather than later, there is the massive problem of the mind-blowing lengths of time nuclear waste needs to break down and the difficulties of disposal, a problem to which no credible solution has yet been found, whether in respect of Torness, Chapelcross or Hunterston in Ayrshire (where power generation has also now ceased).
Back in the 1970s, concerns about safety when Torness was being built led to popular opposition and the formation of the Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace. At the time, the SNP was clear that ‘so long as Scotland has control of adequate alternative energy sources, it is not in the national interest to generate a higher proportion of power from nuclear fission reactions producing plutonium or other radioactive waste’.
We take no consolation from the fact that SCRAM’s warnings and the good sense of SNP policy makers in 1976 are now being vindicated by the ongoing and increasing problems at Torness – we are clear that the need for a rapid shift to environmentally safe renewables and the defence – and development – of well-paid and secure jobs are an integral part of how we should address Scotland’s energy needs. Will Ed Miliband’s initiatives move us in this direction?
This article develops some of the points from Cathie Lloyd's August 2024 'environment report'.