Powerbook for Scotland
Powerbook for Scotland
A Playbook
for Energy Security
by 2030
What's at Stake
The effects of Scotland’s energy insecurity are impossible to avoid. When Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion caused global gas prices to quadruple, household electricity bills more than doubled. Despite the £25bn Energy Price Guarantee, more than one-third of all Scottish households are in fuel poverty as a result.
Britain Remade’s Powerbook for Scotland is a plan to ensure this never happens again through a massive expansion of clean, domestic power. Sky-high energy bills are not inevitable, but the result of a political choice not to build.
Scotland possesses some of the world’s best conditions for wind power, yet it can take up to 13 years to build a new offshore wind farm – even though construction itself takes no more than two years. Safe, reliable, and low-carbon nuclear will be essential to providing baseload energy for a majority renewable grid, but new nuclear is effectively banned in Scotland. There will need to be major investments into grid infrastructure to connect new clean sources of power to families and businesses, but at the moment projects are on hold due to backwards looking regulation and planning delays.
To make Britain energy secure by 2030, we will need to more than triple the amount of energy generated from offshore wind, connect two new nuclear power stations to the grid, and build more grid infrastructure in the next seven years than was built in the last 32. Scotland can and must play a vital role in this story.
The Impact of Energy Security
1
Reduction to Household Bills
2
Independence from Gas Volatility
3
Net Importer to Net Exporter
Time for Action
Scotland has a simple choice. Do nothing and accept another decade of economic stagnation, or get building fast.
To become energy secure by the end of the decade, Scotland will need to:
- Create new Clean Energy Zones where new renewable projects get fast-track planning permission.
- Reduce the statutory planning timetable for clean energy projects to one year.
- Lift Scotland’s effective ban on safe, reliable, low-carbon nuclear.
- Publish a new siting strategy for Small Modular Reactors to secure Scotland’s industrial future.
- Boost grid investment by reforming regulation to allow anticipatory investments necessary to unlock renewables.