This paper

― Recognises the huge economic contribution North Sea Oil and Gas have made to the Scottish economy

― Urges the Scottish Government to add a “just and fair transition” of jobs to the low carbon economy as a priority, and to seek alternative sectors using the skills base and domestic supply chains we have. Alternative sectors are likely to include offshore renewable generation and on-land infrastructure (e.g. district heating, for which we currently import the pipework) as well as decommissioning mature oil wells.

― Railways should be publicly run – Scotland’s rail system is currently structured in a complex manner, which mainly reflects the legacy of the Britain-wide privatisation experiment initiated by the Major Government’s 1993 Railways Act. For the past two decades, Scottish passenger services have been run by a succession of private and foreign state-owned train operating companies (TOCs), which in turn lease their rolling stock from privately-owned rolling stock operating companies (ROSCOs).

― UK energy policy since 1980 has failed Scotland. It has led to the six largest energy companies seeing profit margins rise 4.48% since 2016, with 34.9% of households in Scotland currently facing fuel poverty.

― The Scottish Government should invest in energy infrastructure and electric vehicles to meet 75% of overall energy demand by 2030.

Energy Infrastructure

― Scotland has only captured 0.06% of marine energy potential. The Scottish Government should boost R&D in wave and tidal technology, with an aim to capture 25% of marine energy resource by 2030.

― According to the latest figures, 26.5% (or around 649,000) of Scottish households live in fuel poverty while 7.5% of households (183,000) live in extreme fuel poverty. This is unacceptable in contemporary Scotland.

― The Scottish Government should abandon its staged approach to housing energy efficiency improves as it creates ongoing (rather than one-time) upheaval for construction companies and adds to the problem of retrofitting existing buildings to the most efficient standards.

― Common Weal strongly disagrees with the proposal to end export and generation tariffs for renewable energy on 31st March 2019.

― Doing so will be irrevocably harmful to the renewable industry with the solar industry likely to be badly affected.

― It will slow progress on carbon emission reduction, particularly in England.

― Eliminating the tariffs will not significantly reduce energy costs for consumers who don’t directly benefit from them – research has shown they only contribute to bills by approximately £1 per household per year.

― The aims of the European Union’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), which requires EPCs to be produced for all new buildings and those being sold or rented out, are fundamentally sound and should serve to drive improvements in energy performance. However, in Scotland and the UK, the method by which EPCs are produced are fundamentally flawed. In particular, this is due to the reliance on using modelled energy consumption data rather than actual (measured) data.

―  We have identified no examples of low-carbon heating being taken up on a large scale without government assistance.

― The primary barrier to the roll-out of low carbon heat is financial. Efficient schemes like renewably powered district heating will have to be government financed.

― Without significant government planning, individual households are likely to decarbonise their heat using heat pumps which, while an improvement over fossil fuels, have significant downsides – not least, their collective impact on the electrical grid.

― In principle, Common Weal supports mandatory improvements for houses owned by owner-occupiers and private landlords however we note a number of problems with the proposals covered by this consultation.

― We object to energy efficiency being measuring using Energy Performance Certificates due to the severe shortfalls in the methodology used to determine them.

― The response is strongly of the view that the Scottish Government has significantly under-estimated the financial, resource and time costs involved in using Energy Performance Ccertificates as a basic measure of energy efficiency.

This Technical Report is an annex to The Common Home Plan, a part of Our Common Home – A Green New Deal for Scotland.