The decision by Shell to pull out of the ScotWind programme may prove to be a breeze that passes in the night, but then again, it may not. Meantime, it would be prudent to assume the latter.
Windfarms are usually accompanied by misleading press releases about how many homes they will power, without the caveat “when the wind blows”. The converse headline covering Shell’s decision could be “three million homes won’t be powered by Campion windfarm”.
In the scandalously cheap sell-off of ScotWind leases, Shell paid the highest sum, £86 million. That is an accounting detail in the world of Big Oil which a policy change can easily subsume. Shell has looked again at offshore wind and decided against it, also abandoning a project in the United States.
They were trying for a while to find a buyer for Campion, without success. The Chinese company, Mingyang, have given the pot an extra stir by saying they have had several approaches from ScotWind leaseholders to find if they are interested in buying them out.
Mingyang is the outfit that wants to build a £1.5 billion manufacturing facility at Ardersier, to supply ScotWind projects. This is giving the security bods nightmares as it would put a business close to the Chinese government at the heart of offshore activity in UK waters.
The problem is that, without Mingyang, there are not many other options. Europe is full up. The abject failure to build a supply chain in advance of ScotWind means we are hugely dependent on Chinese equipment.
The question now is whether any of it will be manufactured here. The prospect of Mingyang also owning a chunk of ScotWind generation might not be greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm.
In the short term, all this can be argued away. The Scottish Government says it expected some ScotWind projects to fall by the wayside and, after all, there are 19 left. However, to put it at its mildest, there are uncertainties to temper such optimism which could turn the breeze into a storm.
The SNP’s insistence on putting all Scotland’s energy eggs in the renewables basket, the vast majority dependent on offshore wind, has never made sense. It was always possible, and necessary, to pursue renewables vigorously but not at the expense of other options. That was never an energy policy worthy of the name but political posturing.
For starters, in the hands of SNP ministers, endless boasts about what offshore wind would deliver provided a rationalisation, to their own satisfaction, for an obscurantist hostility to the word “nuclear” when the non-ideological alternative was for Scotland to retain an energy mix which ticks the boxes of both net zero and security of supply.
In North Wales this week, we saw a glimpse of what could have happened here – a £2.5 billion public investment in small nuclear generators which will create thousands of well-paid jobs in an area which has lived happily with the nuclear industry for generations.
That is exactly what should have happened at Hunterston and Torness to take Scotland’s proud history of civil nuclear power into a new era. Blocking that option has been a piece of doctrinaire stupidity which betrays the legacy of those who worked in these places over the past 60 years, safely and to the immense benefit of the Scottish economy.
The equally ill-placed zeal for running down the North Sea, while still relying on gas for baseload, has a higher profile, but the SNP’s prejudice against nuclear is just as irrational – in fact, more so if the drive for “net zero” actually is a priority.
In that context, the choice is not renewables versus nuclear, which are complementary, but between nuclear and over-reliance on imported gas with all the volatility that involves. As ever, the only sensible energy policy uses a bit of everything and is not over-reliant on one source of generation, which is exactly the mistake which Scotland continues to make.
Twenty-odd years ago, I was engaged in the same arguments as energy minister in a Labour government which contained its own anti-nuclear zealots who were determined to close the industry down once and for all. A rearguard action kept the option open and within a few years, it became apparent just how necessary that had been.
One of my memories of that period is of the extremes to which the anti-nukes were prepared to go to in order to rationalise their position. It became the assumed wisdom that, by 2020, 80 per cent of our electricity would come from gas and 80 per cent of that gas would come from Russia which, I heard repeatedly, had never failed to be a reliable supplier even in the darkest days.
In 2008, Russia made its first energy strike against Ukraine and it became inescapable that Putin’s Russia would indeed use its gas exports for political ends. By then, other sources of gas – Qatar, Norway, the US – had emerged, so the folly of that earlier assumption was forgotten but the principle remained the same. Basing an energy policy around gas imports is not a good idea.
Labour went through its own anti-nuclear spasm and grew out of it while the SNP has remained firmly stuck in its time-warp, denying thousands of jobs to a Scottish workforce and placing a foolish degree of reliance on an offshore wind programme which may or may not deliver what is claimed for it, plus the vagaries of imported gas – much of it from Norway.
It doesn’t add up and a decade from now, I can’t help wondering, how many of the pylons being built on the basis of an unproven hypothesis will have proved necessary? By then, of course, the zealots will all have gone.
