‘Scotland needs a Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero’

One of the next Holyrood government’s first acts of the following May’s Scottish Parliament elections should be to make energy and net zero a Cabinet level portfolio, a trade body has urged.

Morag Watson, director of policy for Scottish Renewables, told a breakfast briefing held by Energy UK today (23 February) that a top role should be created in the devolved administration to push through its commitment to cut emissions to net zero by 2045 and to 75 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030.

She said: “We need a Cabinet secretary for energy and net zero. The positions we have in the Cabinet make a really strong statement about the issues we think are most important.

“Energy and net zero at the moment sits beneath Cabinet level although we have all of these commitments. That needs to change and I want see that appointment the week after the election.”

And the pace of policy making on net zero must increase to reflect the climate emergency which the Scottish government has said it recognises, Watson said: “We can’t continue to make policy at the speed we are at the moment. It needs to take months not years: we need to move to an emergency time scale.”

“We need to make the jump that we haven’t made from policy into practice.”

She also said an immediate priority for the Scottish government is the update of the planning policy statement for onshore wind projects, which is due to be published this year.

Watson said to reflect the Climate Change Committee’s advice, a target for the amount of onshore wind deployed north of the border by 2030 should be set, and that 20GW is currently being discussed as a possible figure.

She said that 8GW of wind farms are already deployed but will need to be repowered with new turbines by then and another 4GW has planning consent but has not been deployed due to lack of finance or insufficient grid capacity.

Another “big block”, Watson added, is insufficient transmission capacity and out of date grid charging arrangements which were designed 30 years ago for a very different generation system.

Prof Keith Bell, professor of electronic and electrical engineering at the University of Strathclyde, said that while the rate of implementation of various initiatives like conversions of heating systems must peak in early 2030s, the policies to deliver them must be in place “very soon.”

“The policies to get the momentum for meeting that target has to be defined soon.”