 Good morning and welcome to the fourth meeting of this session of the Economy, Jobs and Fair Work Committee. I remind all present to turn their electronic devices to silent or switch them off if they're liable to interfere with the sound system and also may I welcome our witnesses who will introduce in a minute. The first decision is a decision to take items three and four in on the agenda in private. Are we all agreed on that? I'll now come to our witnesses. The committee is considering the climate change plan and energy strategy. The witnesses with us today are Professor Sean Smith, who is director of the Institute for Sustainable Construction and Professor of Construction Innovation at Edinburgh Napier University. Good morning and welcome, Professor. Our next witness, moving from my left to right, is Elizabeth Leighton, who is policy adviser for the existing Homes Alliance Scotland. Good morning and welcome to you as well. Next is Elaine Waterson, strategy manager of the Energy Saving Trust. Good morning. Finally, Andrew Mawrth, who is the principal officer regarding carbon management for Glasgow City Council. I would ask the witnesses to keep their answers succinct and the committee members will no doubt seek to do the same. You don't need to answer every question, and if you want to come in on a particular issue, then please simply indicate by raising your hand. No need to do anything with the buttons in front of you, the sound desk will take care of that. I would like to start with a fairly general question. I know that some of you have submitted written evidence to the committee, but perhaps each of you could take a moment just to outline very briefly what you consider to be key points of concern in the climate change plan and the energy strategy. Perhaps I will start with Andrew Mawrth and move across from right to left on this occasion. In general terms, I think that both documents are very good, pretty all-encompassing, give a good background and then go on to lay out exactly how the Scottish Government intends to deliver upon these points. My one point of concern is how heavily reliant it seems to be on carbon capture and storage. Although I believe that it is a technology that should be considered, there is a whole half-page dedicated to it, and I urge ministers to consider that and how it affects the overall sort of on-going ambitions and targets. We were pleased to see the ambition of the target reductions for the residential sector, so the 76 per cent reduction is really positive. We are also very pleased to see that the vision around having 80 per cent of households connected to low-carbon heating by 2032, I think that our concern is around whether or not more should be done in terms of doing the energy efficiency stuff more quickly and also possibly around that 80 per cent target while it is a great vision to have the detail on how we get there. Obviously, it is not there yet, and to some extent, that is understandable, but it would be good to have a little bit more detail about what that means in practice. Thank you, Elizabeth Leighton. Okay, thank you. Just to say, for those who might not be aware, the existing homes alliance is a coalition of bodies representing housing, anti-poverty and environmental sectors. Likewise, I support EST's comment about the ambitious vision for the housing and residential sector of homes being highly efficient, and most of them being heated by low-carbon heat. We think that that is the right vision, that is where we need to be in terms of climate change but also importantly in terms of fuel poverty. After all, the most important thing that we can do for those who are fuel poor is to reduce their need to heat at all. That is the best way to make sure that we are putting money in their pockets as opposed to paying for high cost of heat. I think that we have outlined this in our briefing that there is quite a significant credibility gap. We think that it is right to have that ambition but it should not just be wishful thinking. It needs to be backed up by credible policies and resources that give us a confidence that that target will be met and not only us the confidence but gives the marketplace a confidence, gives households a confidence that that is definitely the direction we are going. We think that we need to focus on filling that credibility gap with new policies and proposals and firm interim targets in the final climate change plan. We are very supportive of their targeting measures, particularly for fuel poor, as has been mentioned by others and people in low-income key groups. The previous efforts around renewables and other reduction measures in industries such as the closure of coal fire power stations has all helped to reduce the carbon emissions. In terms of the aspect of forestry that we may not go into today but just to touch on, we are very supportive of accelerating more homegrown timber into our construction products and timber products for housing. We have enough timber to build 3 million homes from our Scottish forest and it supports 16,000 jobs. The efforts there to plant more trees and various other things and support the timber development programme, which the Government and Forestry Commission and Industry undertake, is very supportive of that direction. In terms of transport, which interlinks, I think that it would be useful to come back to that as a holistic approach later on in the discussions today and the influence around building standards and section 7 sustainability, because the plans for electric vehicles that we are supportive of is how we then incorporate that into some of the legislation or regulations going forward so that it links together. Thank you very much. I will open up to general questions from other committee members. Gillian Martin. Andrew Murray picked on something that jumped out at me as well. I come from the area very nearby where Peterhead had the carbon capture storage pilot programme that the funding was taken away from. How do you see the research and get to a point where that is achievable, given that that funding was taken away from that project by the UK Government? I must admit that I do not know that. Given the resource that we have in Scotland for renewable energy, I am not convinced that it is something that we even need to consider. The fact that there has been so much funding available, given the grant that was taken away, given that there has been over the last 10 years even so much funding available for the technology, I would suggest that it would have progressed now had there been a viable option for it, unlike renewables that has increased exponentially over the same period. Specifically on Peterhead, I do not know the detail, I am afraid. Are you concerned that carbon capture is not going to be the answer to reducing the carbon emissions and that we should just scrap it altogether and look for alternative means, or are you? Essentially, yes. I think that it is almost an excuse to continue to burn fossil fuels when, particularly in this country, I do not believe that it is necessary. Okay, that is interesting. Thank you. Bill Bowman. Can I ask Elizabeth Leighton, who I think spoke about getting marketplace and householders confidence. Could you just tell me a little bit more about what you meant by that? Sure. Yes, as I said, the ambition that is set out in the plan provides a signal to industry that, you know, government is serious about this direct low-carbon pathway for housing and that it makes sense to invest in capacity and skills in manufacturing of low-carbon technologies for homes. But if the policies and programs aren't there to back that up and so that both the homeowners believe that that's a direction of travel through either support for regulation, but also signals through nudges like incentives that can be provided, tax incentives, they understand that's a direction, then there isn't a belief that people will take up these measures because, after all, it's not all going to be dealt with through grants and programs to few poor. We have to talk about the whole marketplace of owner occupiers as well, which is why I was going to just highlight this. This is a graph that appears in the climate change plan of the trajectory that's planned and, you know, this is the concern that we're talking about is what happens, you know, suddenly there's expected there's going to be this huge drop, which will be, you know, dealing with a low-carbon heat, but we feel there's much, much more that can be done during this period now where we, there are the measures are available in terms of loft insulation is 600,000 lofts yet to be done, 600,000 cavity walls yet to be done, lots thousands, hundreds of thousands of solid wall insulation, and these are all measures that would make a huge difference for the few poor as well as helping address emissions reductions and setting us up for when those low-carbon technologies come into play because, after all, things like heat pumps work most effectively if the fabric of the house has been insulated as well. So we think there are several, you know, steps. We think, you know, almost you could address about 30% of our housing stock could be brought on to low-carbon heat during these first few years of the programme. We don't need to wait. Could you, sorry, could you give us the reference or page of the chart that you held up just for the record and for future reference? That's figure seven. Sorry, I don't have the page number. It's figure seven from the plan. Section 8.2. Thank you. Page 40. Thanks. Thank you very much. Save, so we need to take people with us, not just tell them what to do. Absolutely. Certainly, yes. Gil Paterson. I think we know that, in relative terms, that local authorities and housing associations are pretty proactive and we're doing reasonably well in that sector, but when it comes to the private sector, this is both in terms of housing and industrial, commercial, etc. When it comes to individuals privately spending their money, there is a reluctance. I need to follow that through. The business that I own will be a number of buildings, some of them are very old, very difficult, but the new one, it was in my control, so everything was done. Regulation takes care of that. How do we make the step change from what happens in the public sector where we're doing reasonably well, but when it comes to the private sector, we fail? Does that, if I should pose a question, take regulation to do that? Or do we just leave it the way it is? Well, I welcome the question because that is something in the climate change plan, which is a good thing. There is a mention that they are going to consult on regulation for the private rented sector, minimum standards of energy performance, and that consultation is expected in this later next month. Regulation is necessary to work on the bottom of the heap, in a sense, the worst performing properties, which are really flatlining along. They're not picking up, and this will give the push to get those properties up to a minimum standard of energy performance, while, at the same time, you're using incentives, advice, support to pull others along to go higher up the energy performance certificate scale. We also recognise in the plan that there's an acknowledgement that the Government is going to look at a phased approach to regulation for the rest of the private sector, and we think that there should be regulation of the owner-occupied sector as well. After all, if you're only dealing with the rented sector, that'll be about a third of the properties, which leaves us with the bulk of the properties not really addressed, and so we would urge that that is brought forward very quickly, and so we have a level playing field across the private housing stock. We can see how regulation has worked so well in the social housing sector, so private tenants and owners should benefit from the same good energy performance that gives us all the benefits of health and wellbeing, as well as saving us money. Professor Smith. I very much support that, and I think that, as you mentioned, what's happened with the public sector and how they've rallied to meet some of the challenges to retrofit and other things has been very positive. The private sector, one would say maybe we've tackled this a bit late, maybe we should have done this a few years ago, England is considering the same. Roughly, on new build, for example, whilst we have legislation for that, they represent 10 to 15 per cent of all home transactions in Scotland. Let's say there's 200,000 properties that are sold across the peace in Scotland in any one year, new build and existing. With that in mind, you have the ability, perhaps if we give the industry enough time, because we need to scale up for this, given the scale, if people know that they had to sell a house in particular a few years' time, and it had to be at Bansi, then they've got time for the industry and the private rented sector, or if you're letting a private rented sector, you've got time to gear up for that. There's one thing that brings out legislation that helps to drive it as a stick, but you've got to give people enough time to be ready for that and have the solutions available or the SMEs ready to react to that. Elaine Waterson. Just to emphasise the fact that there are various ways of softening the blow of regulation around providing zero-interest loans for people, and for the fuel poor, providing grants so that they have the ability to bring their homes up to any regulated standard. It's important to remember that, for householders, regulation is already in place for things like boilers. When someone replaces their boiler, they do need to install a boiler of a certain energy-efficient standard. Regulation already exists. It's not something completely new for the household sector. John Mason. Thanks, convener. Some of the previous questions have sparked questions in my mind, especially following on from Gillian Martin and this whole carbon capture and storage. I don't know if anyone else is going to comment on that. I've always been puzzled by this, because if we're producing something bad and then we just stick it in the ground or keep it somewhere, that strikes me as not sustainable. On the other hand, there is a suggestion that carbon can be reused in the chemical industry or something like that. Can any of you comment or guide me, because I'm not an expert in this field? Is carbon capture and storage as good as using hydro, or are we not comparing like with like? It's not like for like when you compare it against any renewable source, I would argue. When you're talking about capturing from a manufacturing process and reusing that carbon, that's very different from considering carbon capture and storage, which, as you alluded to, is almost an indefinite storage of the emissions in an underground well or facility of some description. I just feel that the amount of energy and money and resource that would go into establishing the industry could be better spent elsewhere in an area that's already delivering results. We're generating 57 per cent of electricity from renewables already, and it almost feels like we haven't really tried that hard. I just feel that it's a distraction. Okay, I'm guided that actually we're getting more about this next week. We may have a witness that's an expert in this, so I'll not ask any more questions on that. I've got something else, or do you want me to... No, no, no, I was just saying I'll put me on the list. Right. Aime, we'll just carry on. The private sector was mentioned, which I think is interesting, this retrofitting and all the rest of it, and immediately I'm thinking, well, where's the cost coming from that? Can we do that kind of thing by regulation? Can we just tell owner-occupiers that they have to retrofit their houses, as we can tell the builders, presumably, that they have to build decent houses to start with, or is it inevitable that there's got to be a pretty hefty grants scheme tied in with any retrofitting for owner-occupiers? Yes, on regulation, I think it can be introduced in a way that you should never really have to enforce it. It should be easy for people to comply. The standard should be set at a level that is relatively, you know, quite affordable, it's easy to do, it's basically just setting a standard that people have to put in place those very common sense measures like hot water tank jackets, loft insulation, draft proofing, you know, quite basic measures that really are just common sense, and it's reasonable to expect that that would be a minimum standard, and it could be done at the change of lease, so it's easier for a landlord to do it when there might be a, you know, a vacancy there, and also you could do it, as Sean was suggesting, when the property turns over, so at point of sale. So if the owner didn't want, if the seller, rather, didn't want to incur that cost themselves, they could actually defer that or transfer that obligation to the buyer, and in that case, it could be picked up through the sale of the house property. Before the new owner moved in, they would have to upgrade or something like that? Or you might have a period of time, you know, you might have a certain number of months by which they would have to upgrade the flat and present their energy performance certificate saying, I have met that standard. So there are ways to do it to make it easy for people, and for them to recognise what benefits they're achieving, and it's not a huge financial burden. But at the same time, I agree with what Elaine was saying, that it does need to be supported by extensive advice and support from the Home Energy Scotland Network loans. There are already zero-interest loans available, and grants who aren't able to pay, because we must make sure that any regulation doesn't disadvantage those who are fuel poor, but, on the contrary, that they are benefiting from regulation. It's been going so far, because there's been various schemes to replace boilers and improve insulation and some of those things. Is it just more of that that we need to do? We do need to up our level of ambition. As I said with the graph that I was showing, and the tables in the climate change plan suggest that the numbers of measures that would be installed right the way through to 2032 stays static at 90,000. The SPICE report that just came out on the climate change plan notes that, in 2014-15, the number of measures that were being installed was 87,000. That seems to me a bit business as usual rather than a national infrastructure priority on energy efficiency, which is transformational and moving us towards a housing stock that is truly low-carbon. We need to up the amount of measures that are going into homes, and that will have to be done through a whole package of measures that will include regulation, but not wholly rely on regulation. It will have to rely on people doing voluntarily up-taking measures as well. That ties into my final question, convener. How does this new climate change plan relate to the previous RPP 1 and 2 that we have had? Do you see them as continuations, or are they a change of direction or just a change of speed? Convener, if I may, I have brought a graph. It is not digital, but I have brought some copies that might explain that, if that is of any help. Certainly, if you want to provide those to us and perhaps if it could be emailed into the clerks after the session so that we have a digital copy. So, yes, how do the documents relate to each other? Well, whilst other sectors in transport and various other things by the means of how we move or our energy supplies changes, the residential sector is generally fairly static in the sense of that it does not change. We already have most of the existing properties here and what will happen over the next coming years will probably add 15 to 20 per cent of the stock by 2050. If you can see the graph in front of you, what we have done is we have brought together the RPP 1, RPP 2, and I do not think that we are allowed to call it RPP 3 now, although we will do for the purpose of this, if I may, but the draft climate change plan. Let me just take you through the graph. The blue dotted line at the top represents the business as usual as forecast in RPP 1. So, the graph that you are seeing here is residential. It is the planned reductions in million tonnes of CO2 emissions. So, the blue dashed line is business as usual as forecast back in about 2008 with RPP 1. The light blue line represents what RPP 1 forecast and planned from the policies that they laid out of the direction of travel. As you can see, it reduces from about seven in 2010 to about five in 2021-22. The orange line is the planned forecast of policies and outcomes and reduction emissions for RPP 2. The black line is the most latest document, which is the expected and planned reductions using the policies. Let me just explain. That difference in 2017 suggests that the current plan of policies on carbon reduction for residential is significantly higher than what was previously planned in the sense that there will be more leakage of carbon emissions because it is above the orange and red line. We then continue on. It is. As if we had done nothing. It then slopes down quite steeply and then plateaus. The key issue is then what happens after 2025. That is where I will defend the Scottish Government, because there are lots of—no matter the political party, there are lots of issues that are happening from the UK that affect the decisions of what we do up here and what we can enforce as policies, whether it be feed-in tariffs, the ecosystems and various other things that are going on, and energy company obligations. However, if we do not hit the preset targets in RPP 1 or RPP 2, what happens is that as we get to this document, equivalent to the RPP 3, you then squeezed into those last seven years between 2025 and 2032 the key push to get to that target that you need by 2032. To give you an idea of just the scale of what is going to be required, and this is where I will touch base with the existing Homes Alliance and the work that they have produced, we still have another 900,000 homes to retrofit. That is quite a significant task. There has been some great work already. I have seen it in my local village. I have seen the changes to people's lives. They have talked about how warm their homes are now and the difference. Not all, but the majority talk about it and the benefits they see. With the remaining time that we have, if we targeted a banned sea for energy performance for these homes, the 900,000, and we really went for 2025 rather than 2032, because I think it is quite difficult to go to the public and say, I am sorry, you are going to have to wait 15 years until 2032 until we retrofit your house, or we have that measure in place. Whether it is through grant availability, whether it is through legislation, whether it is a carrot where we reduce the land and transaction buildings tax for those who go to a banned sea, if we go for 900,000 homes by 2025, we need to retrofit one home every minute with the available time that we have until 2025. Probably in the course of this meeting this morning, the first hour, we should have retrofitted 60 homes if we have to get on target. I hope that that explains where we see the RPP ones to RPPs. Andy Wightman Thank you, convener. I will get my head round those figures in due course. A couple of questions. One, the plan policy outcome one in the residential sector seeks improvements to the fabric of Scotland's domestic buildings. It was holding a 6 per cent reduction in their heat demand by 2032. We have been advised that that 6 per cent reduction is not from a baseline of today or 1990 or whenever, but in fact is a reduction on the projected heat demand in 2032. I am just wondering whether you have any ideas of whether there is an accept, what should be the accepted baseline for measuring reduction in heat demand. I am not sure whether I would respond directly to the question, but I do know that our analysis of the UK Committee on Climate Change's pathway to 2032 suggests an 8 per cent reduction on heat demand. We are thinking that it is not as strong as that, but I am not an expert on that. I think that there will be people on the next panel who might be able to answer that. Part of that demand will be no doubt influenced by occupants behaviour. The data that we have from a number of studies across Scotland where people have had access to real-time displays, so I think that we also can just differentiate between what is a smart meter that sits under your stair or a cupboard and actually someone visually seeing on the display. So most of the smart meters coming out just now will come with an in-home display, so they can see and identify how much energy they are using and on the demand side around their home. We did a study whereby we used real-time displays with good colour graphics in explaining to people easily how they are using electricity and gas and water. We found that there was a 7 per cent reduction in the use of electricity, but that was clearly seen. We had exactly the same sizes of homes, same income groups and other houses that did not have the display, with the direct comparator. Where they had gas, they could use coming to the heat side. They reduced their gas consumption by 20 per cent. Over a period of time, we have gone back to those properties over the last three years, and people are looking less at their in-home display because they have already started to change their behaviour. They know what parts are radiators and other aspects, and there are thermometers and things that they want to change in the house, so, as a result, there is the behavioural change. Occasionally, there is a slip back, but they find that where it says that they have gone over or that it is flashing in a certain amount or that there is a certain red light coming on and that it is telling them that they are using much more, they find that extremely useful because then they can re-benchmark and reset. It is 6 per cent by fabric, which is a different aspect in terms of the insulation. Probably, 8 or 9 per cent is more likely. The question is, what is the baseline for that 6 per cent reduction? That is a very good point. They do not state what their baseline is. We need to do some work on that. There are a number of questions that we have about statistics and other things in here, which we would like to raise some queries on and raise to the committee's attention. You will be raising them? We will do, but we will probably mention a couple today, but we will write in as well. That would be very helpful. My second point is really in relationship to Elizabeth Leighton's reference to wishful thinking. I think that all witnesses have said that the targets, the ambition, are good, but the existing homes aligns. I think that you refer to the fact that it lacks. The targets are not backed up by what you call credible policies or proposals. Can you say a little bit more about that? What would credible policies or proposals look like? Would they, for example, be very specific numbers, very specific actions, very specific timetables and very specific costs? In our briefing that we put out and we will also submit more detailed evidence in the call for written evidence, we suggested improvements that could be made to the plan that we think would help fill that credibility gap. In terms of energy efficiency, we think that there does need to be an interim milestone to indicate the trajectory, the increase in the pace and scale of improving the fabric of our homes up to an energy performance scale certificate banned sea by 2025, so that would be doing your lofts, cavities, walls, all that. This is very similar to the trajectory in the UK CCC pathway. We are pretty much in agreement there, and it is similar to the number of measures that the Scottish Government is proposing over the whole period of 2032. The analysis is very similar, but it is the timescale that is quite different. Quick in the pace and doing the fabric measures. In terms of low carbon heat, do not wait till 2025. We have very just a slight increase between now and 2020, up by a few percentage points. We think that much more could be done. As I mentioned earlier, you are up to about at least 30 per cent. I have been able to sketch out could be done by addressing the off-gas grid properties, getting them all on to heat pumps, or if those that are on electric heat already, either heat pumps or much more efficient electric heating, and then there is all the gas, sorry, district heating, urban networks that are waiting to be developed. These are things that are on the shelf, or should be on the shelf ready to go, and there is no reason why they should not be taken forward from now through to that 2025 period, so we could already, as I said, be at about 30 per cent that are on low carbon heat by then much quicker than what is suggested in this plan. Those are two items in terms of timescale and targets, so you could have interim targets on both fabric and low carbon heat. How do you do it? We need to move much faster on regulation. We have already discussed the benefits of bringing in regulation and the incentives that would go alongside that. That is being consulted on now, but there could be much firmer proposals brought forward in those consultations in terms of timescales and how quickly they could be brought in. I have to mention the budget. I know that that is something that will be under consideration going through the Parliament. The budget is basically standstill, and the programme for government suggests that the budget will stay the same over the next four years. I think that you need an increase in resources that would be consistent with having a national infrastructure priority. It is supposed to be a transformational, a different kind of way of doing energy efficiency, but the numbers in front of you and the trajectory suggest that it is doing much the same. Resources, targets, policies should be represented in the final plan. Professor Smith, we also raised this in RPP2, because if anyone has looked at RPP2, there was the wonder graph with the additional technical advantages and measures, but it was not explained. Not only ourselves but others did, whilst we supported the targets, we challenged the lack of information that was there in RPP2. In the final version of RPP2, in section 5.4.21, it stated, the intent to produce a detailed proposal and how it may realise the potential on the higher technologies that are happening further up the chain, as it were, further in the timescale, in the RPP3 document, but in this document, it is not there. I am coming to the question raised about what sort of information. I think that it is the proportionality, so how might it be district, community, low-carbon heat? How might it be suit through other measures, just as a proportion of how they are going to arrive at this rather than just this? This will require a seismic shift after 2025, not only for this country, but for many, many other countries who are in the same boat with existing housing stock. There is a seize of technologies that will need to be developed, tested and tried. Interestingly, when it comes to the retrofit of community heating or other district heating, it is not as straightforward, sadly. There are all sorts of issues with cartilage, access, various other issues to do with the costs and delays. However, on some of the new build developments or whether there are plans for new housing, there is the potential with some of the plans that are being put forward by the proposed city and regional deal. For example, for Edinburgh and South East Scotland, we have plans to embed and look at the use of and widening of community and district heating with the new housing, linking to other hubs, other infrastructure, surrounding schools, leisure centres, etc. The perfect example of community district heating being put in is the Commonwealth Games Athletes Village. We were involved with part of that with the Commonwealth legacy team. It was a tremendous achievement. The excess heat is helping to support the cycle track, which needs 26 degrees constant temperature, so there was an outflow for that excess heat. However, the actual special pipe work that was required in some of those projects we had to import from Russia. If we are going through insulated pipe works, if we are going to go down this particular stretch, we need to work with the enterprise bodies, innovation hubs, innovation support centres to make sure that we have the products, supports and manufacturing, because it would be a very successful way to tackle low-carbon heat, but we do not want to be importing all the solutions. Andy Wightman, a brief follow-up and then come to Ash Denham. I want to ask a slightly different question about local government. To what extent do you feel local government is part of the plan? It is going to have a lot of responsibilities in terms of delivery. Do you think that it has got the resources and the powers to do so? I think that resource is always going to be something that we could use more of. I am perhaps going to bounce that back to you if I may and suggest that the Scottish Government could do slightly more, in the plattest possible way, to help to facilitate some of the requirements that this plan will have. For good to the athletes' villages, for example, the way that district heating pipe work is treated in terms of the non-domestic rates is one such example of the Scottish Government dealing with another Scottish Government department. The price that the rates are applied at for district heating is the same as those applied at for the gas network, and clearly they are two very different things. That in itself, a very, very small thing, can make the difference between a viable project in terms of the business case and an unviable project. The local authority has a huge role to play in terms of facilitating, for example, district heating networks. I believe that we are making some strides in that, but we do need national support on that front as well. Professor Smith made the point about the importance of retrofitting the existing homes really well in one of your earlier answers. You mentioned a possible incentive of reducing LBTT for people who got their energy performance certificate up to a certain level, or maybe a C. Am I right in thinking that there are problems with the EPC? I have heard of homes that are eco-homes that do not have central heating, that have high levels of insulation and that are heated by wood, and yet when you feed that into the computer programme, somehow it does not accept the parameters because it does not understand, it does not fit in with the way that the computer system is set up, and so the EPC rating that is coming out is not a high rating. Do you think that that is a widespread problem? Yes, I had it with my own home when the severe came round, poor thing. I do not think that anybody was in for it. We had a discussion because we had added a front porch as an example. Our ancestors did not get it wrong when they put front porches into houses because the air changes by just opening your front door and having to reheat is significant. It is interesting to see now quite a few of the house builders are now looking to bring back porches on to new build, which is really good to see. However, it did not count towards anything. We had secondary front door. We had even replaced the front door to be a really top end, thermally insulating front door. It did not make a difference to the EPC. We put in solar or PV. They said that it was not going to make a difference. We were looking at the fabric. I was thinking that maybe it has been changed since then, but it was pretty depressing. Having spent the money and done the measures, we were more comfortable for it, but it did not reflect on the EPC rating. I think that the EPC needs a full overhaul if I could be so blunt. As sooner that happens, the better, but that is a UK-wide issue. It is something that really needs to happen, so we can take account of some of the newer developments that have happened. Do you have any ideas about how many properties are potentially mis-categorised in that way? I think that because the EPC current categorisation is written in stone by the software or what the information is input, it would not be regarded as being mis-categorised. It is a difference of opinion coming to the point that you raised about that someone has done all this. There is an eco-house, they are not burning gas, they are doing something else, but it is not being reflected. It would be interesting if we were to take a sample and then ask through that sample if we were to change the metrics to take account of how many homes might then change. I think that that would be useful to Sue and to do. Andrew Mawr wanted to come in this and then Elizabeth Leighton. Just one point on the EPCs. Part of the issue there is that the actual performance of a building versus the design performance do not often correlate particularly well. Equally, the results after an EPC is done are not necessarily fed back into the programme. We are not getting that continual evolution of the programme and the resultant improvements. It is just going to say on with regard to EPCs to differentiate between what is good about EPCs and what are the problems. What is good about them is that people do understand and relate to that scale because they have had it for years with appliances, now with cars, with homes. That is something good that we should stick with, but I agree that there are improvements that need to be made to the assessment methodology. As Sean said, that is being done through the UK process. I think that they have just closed a consultation on this latest round of improvements. There may be ways—the Scottish Government is very aware of this—about how they might have to have some kind of parallel looking at how the EPC rating and then perhaps something that takes into account the low-carbon heat because that is not very well represented, whereas the EPC is much more focused on energy efficiency, which is fine as long as that is recognised. Let us not throw EPCs out. Let us fix the underpinning methodology and maintain a way of communicating with most people about just how good is my home, A to G. The policy outcomes, too. That is the ambitious target of, by 2032, 80 per cent of domestic buildings would have their heat supplied by low-carbon technologies. I will use an example. In my patch, which is in Edinburgh, there is a big housing development plan. It is 700 homes. It is a mixture of houses. There are apartments. There is going to be a quarter of it that will be affordable homes, possibly then managed by the Housing Association. I know that housing associations and local authorities can apply to the district heating loan fund, which sounds like a really interesting idea. My question is whether we want to get 80 per cent of homes heated by low-carbon technologies. I suppose that this feeds into what you are saying that maybe we need to start doing more now rather than waiting longer. I suppose that, in a mixed-tenure situation like that, it would seem to me that district heating for the entire development would make sense, and yet only a couple of hundred homes in maybe one building could apply for the district heating loan fund. Do you think that we should be looking at maybe making new builds all have district heating? What do you think about that? I think that when you have a particular size of development, the economies of scale then are not so good. Recently, we have heard from one major house builder that SEPA has stepped in and raised an objection to their development. Despite them doing good fabric, they are planning to do for the development, solar, etc. That is a sector that has been really badly hit by all the change in fits, and that is a big SME sector. Again, I know that it is outside the control of the Scottish Government, but for the small SMEs who have been trying to train apprenticeships to install micro-MCS accreditation, it has been really hard for them to take all those changes and fluctuations. However, a particular house builder raised the issue that SEPA has written to them and said that they are going to write to object to their development because it is not putting in enough low-carbon ambition enough. The builders have taken a bit back by that. They have come to ask for advice to ourselves. Primarily because they are saying that if we had known, if we knew the trajectory, we would have pre-planned. If we move it to a district or community heating route, particularly a new build, then as long as we give enough time and warning that those are the intentions, we will have industry and the public on side. It does bring us to one other point. Before I get there, there is an article in page 61 that talks about district heating and the take-up of loans. It mentions that the take-up of loans was lower than expected. It would be useful for everyone to know why people did not take up those district heating loans. There will be some evidence somewhere or some information. I am sure that that would be useful, because this is a learning lesson for going forward. If we want to do more district community heating, we will need to know why people did not take up the loans when they were available. In terms of new build, they mentioned that they would review the energy performance of new homes in 2017. Our strong recommendation is not to change the new build regulations for new housing. They are still bedding in the previous regulations from 2015. They are still bedding in the level of sustainability for energy performance. Give the industry time. It is more bang for the buck to go after the retrofit and support that sector than change the new build. If you were going to change the new build, link transport policy with new build with sustainability and encourage the new build homes to incorporate ULEV connecting points for electric vehicles. There are about £390 per home with a grant, and that would start the transformational shift. If people know that they are buying a home, but it is already there, and they are employers with large car parks or public bodies with electrical charging points, then the home community is speaking to the business community of work or public sector work. You have got an A to B transport and charging point. Final point was about heating interventions made. The idea that you have upgraded somebody's gas boiler makes it much more efficient, but my question would be what is the lifetime of those interventions? Will those things need to be replaced again with another technology in the future? I will pick up on the previous question as well. In terms of the replacement cycle, that is something that should be considered as people are putting in new, efficient gas boilers and have a lifetime of about 15 years. If they are putting them in now, they would be in a good place to look at what is the low-carbon alternative by the time that changes over. That should also apply equally to support for extending the gas network. Should we really be doing that instead of putting people on to a low-carbon alternative of a heat pump or if you can have very efficient electric heating to looking for alternatives and rather defaulting to what is already set out in this plan as what will be an outdated technology? On district heating, I think there is a consultation on heat mapping for requiring local authorities to do heat maps and also for looking at regulation of district heating that would put in place some of the drivers that we were talking about that would require a connection if it was appropriate and that would support the taking forward of district heating. That is something that we very much support and would like to see more prominence given to that in the climate change plan. Lastly, on the new build regs, there is a proposal for, in a sense, almost a Sullivan 3 of looking at building regulations for new build going forward, but it also has a remit for looking at existing homes. I would argue that setting a trajectory for a new build, perhaps there may have been time to prepare, but putting in place that trajectory going forward is important. It is an important signal for the new build industry and it provides for innovation for the existing home stock, but also for existing homes there are routes to look at bringing in standards at point of major refurbishment, because, after all, that is the most sensible time for you to undertake energy efficiency measures on the rest of your home when you are already having work done, and so that could be done through a building regulation process. Thank you. Richard Leonard. I am reminded in all this of the words of the pioneer socialist and ecologist William Morris, who said how it is for the old world to see the new. The world as it is is that 80 per cent of household gas heating comes from gas. The world as it is is that we are in the midst of a programme of smart gas metering being installed. We are living in a world where gas replacement boilers are being installed up and down the country every day of the week, so I am struggling a little bit to understand how we will get from the position to date of about 80 per cent of heating supplies in households coming from gas to a position in just 15 years' time where 80 per cent of heating supply to households will come from low-carbon technologies. I wonder whether somebody could help me to understand the transition from the old world to the new. I am not sure that anyone understands that, and I think that that is part of the problem. It is really unclear what that mix will look like out to 2032. Will the majority of people be on air-soath heat pumps? How many people will be connected to district heating? What proportion of households will still be heated by gas but with hydrogen injected? It is not clear, but you are absolutely right. Arguably we are looking at two-point something million households having to have heating systems retrofitted. If that is expected to happen in that really short time period between 2025 and 2032, what about someone that in 2025 has just installed a new gas boiler that is going to have a lifetime of 12, 15 years? That is beyond the 2032 time period. Are we going to be asking people to replace a system that they have paid for before the end of its life? I think that there is lots of uncertainty there, and I am not sure that anyone knows the answer. Presumably the author of the target knows the answer. Even the author of the target suggests that that is more work that needs to be done in order to define. I think that the times model knows the answer. The modelling is driving that forward as being cost-effective. I agree that it is difficult to get your head round it, but I suppose that maybe you go back 20 years and 20 or 30 years when there was more of the dash for gas. The transition can happen, given that the right drivers are put in place. If it is seen as in the public interest, as that support can happen. I go back to what I said earlier, we should focus on what we do know we can do now. That is dealing with the off gas, dealing with the electric, getting the district heating systems in. We can do that now. By my estimates and Scottish Government estimates, that gets us to about 30 per cent. It is not 80 per cent, but we know that we can do that. Let us focus on making sure that that happens in the next five to ten years, as well as doing all those fabric improvements. I agree with that. Particularly in some of the rural areas, that is where the opportunity should be taken in small villages. For towns and cities, that change is stratospheric, very difficult. The other issue is the incentive. If your current gas expenditure is a third of your electricity cost in terms of what you are paying, if gas is a third of electricity, you might ask the question, why would I shift? Why do I want to shift to something that may be electric based if it is three times the price? The price is change, there may be other incentives or other taxes, who knows, but it is very difficult. Let us not forget the pressures on the grid coming up in the next few years, electrification of cars, further electrification of the railway lines and various other measures. The resources are not easy to fulfil the demand and need that will come. In an early answer, Professor Smith referred to the importation of pipes from Russia to fix up district heating projects, and he made a wider point about the supply chain. I wonder whether he could perhaps develop that because we are the economy jobs and fair work committee. I wonder whether he could say something about the potential for job generation for the growth of the supply industries to some of those new low-carbon technologies? On the jobs side, if I can start off with the more negative side of things of what is coming in the next few years, because we have a really tough task for construction just now in the sector, not just in Scotland but across the UK, but giving you some Scottish figures. By 2021, 19,000 people will have left the jobs market of the construction sector in Scotland through retirement, various other means. We need to replace an annual recruitment requirement in Scotland of 4,000 people per year. The growth of South East Scotland in Edinburgh will require an additional 1,200 people to be trained per year for the next five years to meet the growth trajectories of the 28 per cent growth in population that is happening in South East Scotland, particularly around Edinburgh. When you consider Brexit, 12 per cent of the UK's construction workforce are EU workers. Scotland is about 9.6 per cent, roughly about 1 in 10 per cent. In London, 35 to 50 per cent of EU workers are based on the house building sites. We saw what happened in the 80s and 90s when London booms or they need the skills, there is a sort of migration internally in the UK of the workforce south to London. Taking everything else that we have to do, the task alone of just getting enough skill people to come in will be significant. I think that construction really needs further support from the Government. I know that it has put in for more modern apprenticeships and things, but as a sector to build hospitals, to care homes, the flats, the residential, the retrofit, it is a sector crying out for a lot more help to achieve this. In terms of jobs, for every new build home that we build, the jobs are 4.3 jobs for every home that gets built. Interestingly, the figures that show here are for every £100 million of investment in retrofit. It is 1,000 jobs. I think that the figures higher than that have done themselves down a bit in the statistics. They say that Scottish Government analysis, but they do not reference the report, so I would really like to see that. Our feeling is that it is much higher than 1,000 jobs for 100 million investment. Significant jobs, if you consider what we were talking about before for retrofit. If we go after one home every minute for retrofit, that is a considerable amount of activity. Most of the questions that I was going to ask have been covered by other members, but one thing that I was not going to ask about was the service sector. I am noting that the service sector carbon envelope is expected to reduce by 96 per cent over the next 16 years, the second most ambitious reduction after the electricity sector. I was just wondering how realistic that number was. It is certainly on the non-domestic sector and commercial and other things. The biggest gap that we have now, if we go forward with the carbon reductions energy efficiency plans across all the building stock, is in the commercial and public sector areas. There are some great projects going out on just now in Scotland to determine more accurate, better solutions. Cydiburnham Council is doing one just now, where they are mapping all of their current building stock, and they have non-residential to look at all the various solutions. We know that local authorities have also been looking at various aspects of their building stock, but it may be better to ask local authority persons to respond to that. From the private sector, there is a huge amount of work that is required, because, at least with housing, we have a standardised approach. We have 270,000 blocks and we have 240,000 tenements in Scotland, so we have a fantastic standardised approach that we could take. As soon as we go non-residential, as soon as we go into the commercial or public buildings, the building variation is bespoke across the country. Therefore, the remedial treatments, fabric or other energy solutions that are required to register carbon footprint become more complex. Is there any easy intervention that can be put in place in order to push everybody towards that target? I do not have a full answer for that. I will pass to other colleagues. I might be straying outside my existing homes brief, but in the Climate Change Act 2009, there was enabling powers to introduce regulation of the non-domestic buildings sector. Those were just introduced last year. While that is good that they are there, I would say that they are quite weak, very light touch, and it is basically just requiring some assessment to be done, but not really much of a requirement to act on that action plan. I would hope that this climate change plan could require a review of what has been put in place and that that is strengthened as soon as possible, because for the non-domestic sector it must be relatively easy to regulate. It may be a bit of a challenge to sometimes find the solutions, but I think that in many cases some proper regulation brought in place would rather quickly bring up the standards. We have spoken quite a lot about policy and regulation, which has been very helpful, and you have covered a lot of the other questions that I had. Can I turn now to technology and the role of technology in this area and get your thoughts on the use of new technologies in energy efficiency and decarbonisation, and how the energy strategy can best incorporate the use of new technologies? Professor Smith spoke about smart metres and how they have resulted in a reduction in energy usage at key points. I understand that there might be possibility going forward that you can monitor your energy consumption through your mobile phone, which I think would be a real step forward. What other changes might be coming down the pipeline in terms of new technologies, because policy will obviously have to keep pace with new technologies? Can I just add to what Sean was saying about smart metres? One thing that we are working on at the moment and really keen to do more of is to look at how we can link the advice that is provided through Home Energy Scotland to people's smart meter data so that we can provide much more personalised and specific advice to people based on their actual energy use and their actual energy use patterns so that we can spot what is happening and talk to people much more about what behaviours they might be using in the home and how they can control their heating better, et cetera. On the point about technologies, my answer is going to be more about the use of technologies, such as smart meters, because, after all, that is when we will really gain the realise the potential of how they can help us to reduce energy. I think that much more needs to be provided, and I would like to see it spelled out in the climate change plan in more detail, is support in terms of how people use energy in their homes. Some of those technologies that come in, such as using a smart phone to remotely manage your heating, are fantastic, but a lot of people do not have a clue of how to do that, let alone how to use their heating controls in their home. Some of the pilot studies for the new energy efficiency programme are looking at what kinds of support work best at first identifying what the needs are in terms of their energy use, what are the solutions, and then an aftercare programme of making sure they know how to use the radiator controls. They know about curtains, just the basics, and it is proving to make quite a significant difference. It is really value for money, because they are not just getting the kit put in, but we are actually seeing that performance gap addressed between what is predicted and what is going to save to what actually happens and the person's experience. On some of the new technologies, we have been through various phases recently, where industry, government, construction and product suppliers have looked at different products. One of us, in relation to a new type of thermal board, for example, which had some of the great plans for the older stock, particularly pre-1919, those thin type of boards would have been super efficient in terms of their performance. Both of us, Historic Scotland and others, have looked at those boards and there are issues, particularly in the cost, but other issues in relation to their creep over time. That said, there are other things happening just now in terms of the internet of things that has just been touched on there, and there are some Scottish companies developing new softwares. We have tended to find that people are not too keen on the control side from their phones or whatever else, but they are just more interested in the data and the information so that they can see what is going on. To that end, there are a number of companies in Scotland developing softwares that will help people to understand how they are utilising things within their own homes or their car. You become almost the energy person wherever you are driving, doing etc. Living is going to be part of what is in this piece of software. Developments in some of the electrical sectors such as OLED TVs—we remember seeing those about eight or nine years ago—were great to see them coming out, reducing the amount of energy that is going to be required. There is also a learning curve because we have seen with the push some years ago on passive homes and passive directions. Although it is a bit of a strange name because it is not passive, we use mechanical ventilated systems. I remember walking into a demonstrator house with a lot of Government MSPs and civil servants and other people from different parties a few years ago into a passive or near-passive house. Most people were pretty frightened by it. They did not like the feel of it. The air did not move. That said, you can still open windows, so there are a few myths. Of course, you can open a window in passive. We have to be careful because if we drive up the temperature or energy performance of the building so much and people are not ventilating and they do not understand how to live in a passive home, then you get blackmail, damp, asthma and various other things. With the mechanical ventilated heating that you require for passive type directions of energy standards, you also need to change the filters. Most people do not change the air filters above their cooker hoods, so we are not going to require them to change the air filters for the mechanical ventilated heating system quite regularly. There is a paradigm shift for people to understand how they use that home with the new technologies. The best steps that we have seen coming are in the fabric. Recently, Scottish House builders have built a series of prototype and other homes that are now coming into the market. The average energy building in Scotland is about £1,400 a year, the dual fuel building. Those new homes are £300 a year or less. The mechanisms are there through less sexy technologies, if we could put it that way, through the more standard approach that some of the fabric and Scottish companies can deliver that, which is tremendous and the architects are designing it. The local authorities are very supportive because it is hitting the energy performance standard and it is not requiring too high tech. I point out that perhaps we do not need to rely too much on new technologies. There is a lot of stuff already there that we are not doing particularly well yet anyway. On the behaviour of change side of stuff, more on the non-domestic side, I must admit, but we have found that any intervention that we implement is best to target those that do not require the input of the user. That just takes the behaviour change issue out of the equation altogether. Things like building fabric improvements that do not require people to know how to do things or require maintenance or any of these longer-term thoughts are preferable in my opinion. You will always get those who pursue the technologies and want to have the latest kit and gear. That is fine, but building fabric stuff, localised electricity and energy generation in general, local district heat networks, those things are already there. The technologies support those things are already there. I do not think that we need to worry too much about what is over the horizon. On the building fabric side of things, I think that it is really important to note that, even when you improve a home's building fabric, often people inside the home do not know, for example, how to change their heating controls as a result of living in a warmer home. They will, for example, do things like open the window to start to control the heating. To come back to the point that, even if we are just focusing on building fabric improvements, the people in the home are a really important part of that, and knowing how to use the heating controls is really important if we are to get the carbon savings that we should be getting. Back in about 2007-08, we advised, as did others, that we should be putting 200 millimetres of insulation in lofts, because, although we are there, not putting 100, we need to put at least 200. Sadly, we did not do that. Now it is interesting that one of the policies is that, by 2032, I think that they want to have 200 millimetres of insulation in the loft. So we are going to have to go back into a lot of those homes and put in that second layer. One point to note just to the committee on page 48, 8.23, their first milestone, where they said that by 2020, 60 per cent of walls will be insulated. According to our stats, they are already at 60 per cent, just now, depending on—as far as we've done, we've gone through these. It's cavity and solid. Yes, that's right. So previously, the page before, they cite that they're up to 71 per cent for cavity and 11 per cent for solid wall. When we take the figures for the solid and the cavity walls that are available, we have them at roughly 60 per cent already just now. So I think that milestone—I think that they've stated elsewhere—they see it as 57 per cent at the moment for cavity for external walls. I think it'd be nice to see that milestone lifted above 60 per cent, so it reflects as a real milestone. And while we're speaking about milestones, Professor, 200 millimetres, is that about eight inches for those who think in old measurements in terms of— It is. The optimum depth is actually 270 millimetres, but 200 would be better than 100 at least. Right. Thank you very much. On that note, we'll close this section of this morning. I'll suspend the hearing to allow us to change witnesses. Thank you very much to all four of our witnesses for coming in today. I'll also note that Jackie Baillie has intimated to apologies to the committee member who had expected to be here, but I'll just note that at this stage. Thank you very much. We'll recommence at 10 minutes, too. Welcome back to everyone. I thank our witnesses for coming along for our second panel this morning. In no particular order, we have Gina Hanrahan, who is climate and energy policy officer at WWF UK. Professor Keith Baill, who is, I think, of Scottish Power Professor of Smart Grids, is what I have here. Perhaps you can correct my misdescription if that is what it is. Co-director of the UK Energy Research Centre at the University of Strathclyde, Dr Mark Winskell, research fellow of the University of Edinburgh, and Gillian Herding, who is access project manager of Community Energy Scotland. Welcome to all of you this morning. I'll start with a general question, and that is if each of you could give, perhaps very briefly, your key points and key concerns about the climate change plan and the energy strategy. So perhaps starting from left to right, Gillian Herding. Sort of echoing the points of my colleagues on the panel this morning, in general terms, we're obviously happy to see the continued support or the continued ambitions of the plan, and in relation to the strategy, they support this, maintain for community energy. Obviously, we see community energy as a fundamental sort of key driver in the transition that needs to happen in terms of changing consumer awareness, consumer behaviours as we move towards smart energy transitions. I suppose in terms of concerns around that, it's mainly, perhaps less of a concern, but more of a consideration around the role that communities are expected to play when they're taking forward these innovative projects. Previously, we've seen communities really easily able to access funding for renewable energy systems through the feed-in tariffs and so on, and that was a really good way of communities engaging with the energy policy in a roundabout way. But now, when we're expecting more innovative solutions, innovative technologies, communities are really taking on a huge risk in the delivery of these projects. I think that that's not to say that there's not any sort of lack of motivation or ambition or even capability there, but I think it's maybe a concern around sharing that risk. The energy strategy sort of reflects on the fact that it expects some of these projects to fail because of their innovative nature, but I think it would be wise to consider the impacts of that on the local communities themselves, but what it means for taking further sort of smart energy projects forward in a similar way. Thank you, Professor Bell. Yeah, thank you very much. I'm not of Scottish power, by the way. I do speak as an independent academic, although they do sponsor the chair just to put that on the record. Thank you for that clarification. My apologies. I think this is warmly to be welcomed, the energy strategy. I think as a responsible and civilised nation, I think it's absolutely right that we play our part towards the global efforts towards decarbonisation, and of course we need to ensure reliability and affordability of energy. I think it's right that that is expressed through some targets, and it's right that those targets are stretching, but it's also going to be realistic and ensure that they are achievable, albeit they should be ambitious to some extent. I think nothing has to be applauded is the attempt to consider the whole energy system, so not just electricity, not just heat, not just transport, but the whole thing together. And there's a lot of very difficult trade-offs to be evaluated in doing that. I can't honestly say that this is the final answer. I think what has been presented in the draft, both the draft climate change plan and the draft energy strategy, should be seen as firstly as draft, but it's a really good starting point for discussion, for debate, and then for further analysis. I know that the Scottish Government has been working very hard to improve their modelling and analysis capability, and that's absolutely to be applauded again, but I think there is more to be done. It's a challenging thing. There are definitely uncertainties, both in terms of the modelling itself, inherently by the time you make the kinds of approximations you need to make to give some sense of whether all of this really is achievable and what seems to be the main pathways, but also just in the data that goes in that, what the trends are likely to be in terms of relative technology costs, how, as you were talking about in the previous session, how energy users are going to engage with some of the different technologies or some of the different interventions. So, yes, it's good that this has been published. It's good that there are ambitious targets. We need to explore, I think, the achievability and a bit more detail on the different pathways and on the implementation further. And, of course, in that, the Scottish Government is one among a whole number of really important stakeholders. UK Government, of course, is very important to date to the EU. It has been very important. We have to see how that plans out. Of course, industry and individual consumers are very important in all of this as well. WWF would strongly welcome the 50 per cent target that was set for renewable energy by 2030 in the energy strategy. I think that that's a target that's both credible and achievable, something that we've been calling for a long time, together with a whole range of different stakeholders and industry. So, that's a very, very welcome step forward. And it gives confidence about the direction of travel now. On the climate change plan more broadly, I suppose, we are overall disappointed at the level of policy detail that's included in it. It used to be called the report on policies and proposals. It's got a snazzier title now, but ultimately what this is supposed to do is give a clear indication of all the policies and proposals that are going to deliver the targets that have been set out from the times model. And we don't have confidence that there's enough in there that the carbon envelopes will be delivered. The Committee on Climate Change has repeatedly said that more policy effort needs to happen if we're going to deliver on existing targets, let alone future targets. But I think there are three areas that are within the remit of this Committee that it's worth focusing on as deficient. The first is on energy efficiency. We heard a lot this morning about how the approach is pretty much business as usual, and that's despite the very, very welcome commitment to make energy efficiency a national infrastructure priority. But if we're going to be strong about that and maximise the benefits of making that an infrastructure priority and bringing all homes up to a really good standard, we need to move much faster than the plan indicates. We need to fund it and we need to make clear how we're going to deliver on it, and I don't think there's enough detail there. On heat, I think there's a very stretching policy outcome in both the residential and services sectors for almost complete decarbonisation, 80 per cent in homes and I think 94 per cent in the non-domestic sector. But there's very little detail about how that's actually going to be delivered and what it looks like in terms of technology mix. There's a proposal in there that backloads effort to the late 2020s, starting from 2025. I think there's an issue around credibility there in terms of policy. On electricity, I think overall the plan is, the energy strategy and the climate change plan are good, they're welcome steps forward, it's good to see an acknowledgement that we're going to have a new decarbonised system by 2020. I would question the reliance on CCS for negative emissions from the mid 2020s. That might come to pass but we shouldn't build it in as our plan A. Yes, hello. I agree with most of what's been said so far. I think there are some issues about just at the very high level in terms of the way the two documents look together. And also the kind of process for consultation. We've been working, Keith, as a UK energy research centre colleague of mine and I also work for climate exchange, which is the Scottish Government National Centre for Expertise on Climate Change and Energy Policy. We've been working reasonably closely with the Scottish Government in helping to provide advice for the energy strategy and the plan. I think overall it's already being said by everybody that we welcome the ambition. Climate science is ever more kind of confident about the urgency and scale of the challenge globally and how that cascades down to Europe and to nations. So that's all welcome. We've got raised ambition in the climate change plan. The overall carbon envelope is raised as related to the most recent advice from the Committee on Climate Change. That again seems appropriate. I think that one of the problems we have is the amount of detail that we're seeing in both documents is lacking in terms of how we can go about engaging and offering advice on alternative pathways and technology portfolios, levels of demand, assumed demand and so on. We have a single pathway in the climate change plan, which is appropriate because there has to be a single advice to Government, but there isn't any attempt to look at alternative pathways to systematically go through what if CCS doesn't appear or things like that, what if demand can be reduced more rapidly than perhaps is assumed in a single climate change plan. There's a problem there, but looking at the energy strategy, which is the companion piece, we don't see any alternative integrated pathways that would allow us to systematically interrogate assumptions about overall system cost, relative efforts on supply and demand, and there was some interesting discussion just at the end of the last panel about the technologies already there. We don't need to think about radical technologies, we can just use the technologies that already exist, and there was a suggestion that we can avoid a lot of behavioural change if the smart thing is just to avoid disruptive behavioural change. All those issues need really interrogating and thinking through systematically what if those technologies don't appear. I think that there's a bit of a problem about how we engage from now on in the consultation period. I know that the Scottish Government's intention is to make this information available over time, but it isn't there at the moment. Thank you very much. We'll start with a question from Dean Lockhart. Sorry, can I come in a bit later? Yes, certainly. Do we have a question from Andy Wightman? Thank you, convener. Thanks for those opening remarks. I just have a number of things to pick up on, but first of all, it's not entirely clear to me. The overall target is set, and that's clear, but it's not entirely clear why the individual sector envelopes have been set at the level that they have been. I'm not entirely clear as to the constraints that were placed on the model to get the pathway that we've got. I've asked the Scottish Government about this, and they say that they would do as much as they can to provide greater transparency, but I'm still not clear. Are any of you clear why the different sectors have got the targets? No. I think there's two potential ways of looking at this. One is to say, well, come on, give us the detail. You've done all this modelling. You're producing a strategy. It's receiving a lot of attention quite rightly, a lot of discussion, not just us, but lots of other people, lots of investors looking at it. Surely you can give us some more information and some more detail and more of the sensitivity analysis around it. Absolutely, I would totally agree with that. On the other hand, my understanding is that they're really just kind of building up this modelling capability. Now, maybe they should have invested more time and resource into it because it does have such an influence on the way the strategy is perceived and the way in which the different sectors are going to respond to it and see it as potentially the right or a good pathway to follow. I think I would certainly encourage greater investment of time and effort on the part of the Scottish Government and advisers working with them to produce exactly that kind of analysis and the detail. As Mark said, there's a lot of uncertainty around precisely what pathway is. This is only one among a number of potential pathways. The assumptions that have gone into that are not clear. I think that Gina mentioned about the heat decarbonisation, for example. There are things in some of the charts that are produced in the documents that do look like modelling artefacts rather than necessarily reflections of a real world, as we might expect to see it. You've got to start somewhere. There's basically more work to be done, so let's encourage the officials and their advisers to get on with that. I do agree with that. The Scottish Government has already said that there is a process by which the modelling results have been fed back to the policy teams and then to the cabinet sub-committee for sign-off and so on. The modelling is almost a starting point for a systematic kind of look at energy and climate policy. It's a particular tool, so there are other ways of doing—the RPP2 process was very different. It was a bottom-up sector by sector approach, which had a lot more detail in some of the policy domains than we've got in the climate strategy. There are advantages to the way that this has been done with the times model. In the UK energy research centre, we've spent a lot of time using the same tools, but we've learned as well that the system models give you a partial insight, and there's an awful lot of off-model knowledge that has to go into any properly integrated strategy. I think that one of the issues is that we don't have—in this business of sector envelopes, so if you look at the Committee on Climate Change's advice on the same pathway, so the Committee on Climate Change published some pathway analysis in March last year for Scotland based on the same period, 28 to 2032. If you compare the sector envelopes that the CCC came up with compared to the CCC plan, they do look quite different. For example, there's much less emphasis on building sector emissions—domestic and non-domestic—out 2032 in the CCC work than you find in the CCC plan. There's much more emphasis on transport sector emission reductions in the CCC work, so the CCC didn't use a system model. They did bottom-up analysis. Akin, as opposed to RPP2, there's some modelling work commission, but they didn't use the times model, so the CCC haven't had use of the times model, I don't think—the Scottish times model. It does beg question why this pattern of sectoral carbon envelopes and what kind of sensitivities have been looked at. I think that that work has been done within Government. I know that the Government gave evidence to the Environment Committee last week, and they said that they've looked at different scenarios, that they've looked at what if we don't get CCS on the system. That has been looked at, that's been costed. You can imagine what we're seeing is a version of a least-cost pathway, but we're lacking enough data and evidence on the assumptions and things that we can really help in terms of the consultation process from now on. Given that we've only got a few months to do this, I think that it would have been helpful to make that a bit more systematically evident so that we can get to work on the assumptions and the data. That's very helpful. I note, for example, that I'm coming in on that, I think, and then you can come in. I'll briefly add to that and echo the points that have been made already. Just to clarify, I think that two of the sectors that are going to be the biggest emitting sectors in the 2030s, so agriculture and transport, were inputs to times rather than outputs of times. Is that correct? Close to that, anyway. The assumptions were done elsewhere. The assumptions were built outside the times model, so that's important to note. I think that transparency is key here, and I think that we do need to understand particularly what policy political constraints were imposed on times and how far what we see in the climate change plan is from the original run of times. I think that understanding the various iterations of it is very important. This goes particularly hard on heat, for instance. Does that then let other sectors off the hook when there might be huge progress that can be made much faster, for instance, in transport? We're less ambitious there than we are on heat. I think that understanding times and why it's done what it's done is crucial. Gillian Herding, perhaps, then. It's a very general point, I suppose. I think that it's just to not—with those considerations, and I take Keith's point about having to start somewhere—with the modelling and the sectoral envelopes. I think that it's important to maintain that acknowledgement that when we're transitioning to the smart energy systems, there will be sharing of this generation and demand. There will be sharing of CO2 outputs that will need to be encompassed into whatever is taken forward. I don't know how that modelling would look if we're not sure how the existing modelling already exists, but it's important to bear that in mind that smart energy transition will involve sectors that are operating in that way. Andy Wightman, I think that you wanted to come in. Just two brief supplementaries. What evidence do you have, Gina, that assumptions around built outside the times model—I mean, if they were, I'd like to know what those assumptions were. Obviously, you may not be privy to them, but what evidence do you have that they were actually built? The second point is a relationship to your WWF's recommendation that there shouldn't be an assumption in favour of negative emissions for electricity by 2032, but if CCS is a technology that works, then presumably CCS should do as much as it can. Is underpinning that recommendation the fact that you don't think that CCS should be given the status that it has in the plan? To deal with the first question on agriculture and transport, I'm not privy to the full workings of times, but that's my understanding based on conversations with the modellers, and I'm sure that the Scottish Government could provide you with much more detail on that. On the CCS point, there might be an important role for carbon capture and storage globally, particularly in the industrial sector long-term. A lot of people do see it as an important part of the decarbonisation pathway. We have done a number of pieces of research over the last number of years, so WWF, in conjunction with Friends of the Earth Scotland and RSPB Scotland, commissioned work by Ricardo Energy and Environment, which looked at Scottish electricity system and, indeed, renewable energy more generally. It showed that we don't need to have CCS to decarbonise electricity in Scotland and deliver security of supply by 2030 so that we can maximise our renewable energy resources and have an effectively wholly decarbonised system without CCS. We don't need it for electricity here, though it may have an important role to play in decarbonising industry long-term. What we're just questioning is the credibility of relying on it to deliver minus 1.1 megatons by 2032. That's a significant amount of emissions. If that doesn't come to pass, where do we flex in other sectors to deliver more? We just don't see it as part of plan A for this climate change plan, particularly in electricity. I wonder if I could maybe add to that. I think that I would echo what Ginear is saying about the risk associated with, apparently, relying on a particular technology, but that isn't what a strategy should be setting out. Here's a reliance on any particular technology. It should be setting out shorter-term policy interventions that enable the longer-term outcome, even if the particular pathway by which we reached that longer-term outcome is still, to a large extent, to be determined. That means that you go for the low-regrets type of actions in the short term to keep different options open that seem to have some potential for the longer-term. That would seem to me to include CCS, where the potential benefits of it, if it does come to pass in the kind of cost regions that people are talking about, would be very large. As you say, if you've got it and it works and it's cost-effective, then use it. Of course, we don't know what the costs are really going to be, so it's not my area. It's not something that I feel confident speaking about. I know you've got a session next week where you'll be hearing about that. You'll be hearing from a geologist, for example, who can tell you a lot about the storage aspects of it, but I would encourage you to talk to a chemical engineer who can talk about the other aspects of it to get an idea as to whether the kind of cost assumptions that are typically used by energy economists are really robust. I just wanted to come back on Andy's point about the assumptions on things like transport being made out with the model, and that is specified in the annex. There's a times model annex at the back of the CC plan, which makes it clear that the carbon envelope transport was developed through some consultancy research and through Transport Scotland. For the residential sector, they used the national housing model. It's interesting that, for demand, the version of the model that's been used isn't elastic demand, so that means that the levels of demand are being inputted into the model rather than allowed to develop within the model. If we're thinking about the overall approach and whether there's enough emphasis on demand reduction, it would be interesting to know why we have those kind of levels of assumed demand. The demand reduction levels are quite modest to me in the heat sector, so I'd like to understand those a bit more. That seems to have been based on external assumptions, so I think that that would be one of the key areas for me. Gina Hanrahan wants to come back briefly on this, and then we'll move to a question from Bill Bowman. Just briefly on the issue of negative emissions, the energy strategy seems to indicate that a lot of that will be delivered through bioenergy, carbon capture and storage. We don't have enough detail on that. I think that the strategy commits to a bioenergy action plan or strategy to come forward in the next year or so, but that raises sustainability concerns around where that source of bioenergy is coming from. We just don't know enough at this stage to say whether that's a credible and be sustainable. Bill Bowman, convener, I'd just like to go back to something that Gillian Herding said earlier about community energy being key. At some projects, you said that we're being inhibited by risks that we're being passed to them. Was that financial risks or other risks? How would you suggest that those are dealt with? I think that my general point was about the sort of move to expecting community energy is sort of driving that innovation. It is at the forefront of that innovation and I think it's a real achievement of Scottish communities, and obviously with the financial support that the Scottish Government has provided through various schemes that we're at that stage. I think now and sort of given the regulatory constraints or the political constraints that perhaps Westminster are more inclined to impose on these sorts of projects or the impacts on these projects, there's a risk for communities if these projects do fail, what it means for them sort of as individuals, often voluntary-based organisations to then take forward additional projects, but also what that means to within their local community, but what that means for other sort of similar smart grid projects going forward. In terms of risk sharing, it's really sort of, you know, these projects involve a lot of sort of very broad stakeholder partnerships, so of communities working with organisations like energy suppliers with DNOs or DSOs, and that's conversations that they might not normally be involved with, so this isn't something just a plug, but organisations like intermediaries like Community Energy Scotland working sort of to sort of navigate that path with them I think is helpful, but I think sort of more basic things like extending delivery times for those sorts of projects, maybe from three to five years, and acknowledging the timescales that it takes to go from, you know, conceptual ideas to full-scale delivery and implementation would be helpful as well, and I think sort of yet help with the financial risk of those projects would be beneficial as well, you know, with the removal of the feed and tariffs and so on. It's proving more difficult for communities to get financial support, so loans and so on, so it is very difficult for them to muster the capital investment up front. So you think they need more advice or they need some form of legal protection? I think there's definitely an acknowledgement of the complexity of those projects, and as they move to sort of more demand-side management-based projects, communities are working with energy suppliers to provide heating services, for example. So if you're looking at that model, yes, we're working within projects that personally manage, we're working with the legalities of the energy supplier that is in the project partnership, but I think, yes, having some sort of general advice that's consistent to these types of innovation projects would be helpful. A brief follow-up from Gillian Martin. Can you be more specific about the types of projects where you have seen a risk when taking where there has been fear? Can you give me an example of where that's happened and why that's happened? Well, you're talking about communities who've invested in a project where it actually hasn't worked out for them as a result of maybe a change in policy or tariffs being imposed or any kind of subsidies being withdrawn. Can you give me an example of where that's happened? No, sorry, I should confirm. Those projects haven't failed or there's not sort of particular projects that I'm referencing at the moment. I think that just within the energy strategy it acknowledges that some of those projects might fail, and that leads to the point that they will include the learning from those projects as well, so we can take that forward. I think that it's within that context. For example, when we put bids together for these types of projects, allowing sort of scope, sort of allowing funds to go towards the operational cost to like a very comprehensive risk assessment and that sort of thing, so I'm talking preventatively rather than based on something that's happened. Thank you, Ash Denham. Certainly, as I was reading through the documents, I was really interested to see the proposal for the creation of the Government-owned energy company and that it might be potentially funded by selling Scottish renewable energy bonds. I'm interested in the views of the panel on that, what sort of impact they think it might have and whether it is something that the Government should be pursuing. I think that anything that extends the funding mechanisms that communities can access, consumers can access, is helpful. The option of a Government-owned energy company offers a little bit more longevity in that sense. In terms of the renewable ones, I think that that would be a positive step forward. I think that it allows individuals or communities who might not necessarily own properties, own space to buy into renewable energy and I think that it is a very positive option. I'm not quite sure what the legalities are of the state getting involved at whatever level, but the idea of a bond has some attractions. Just to add on the proposal around the Government having extensive power purchase agreements as well, I thought was interesting. As a way of alternative support for onshore wind, it's kind of raised and hinted at in the document, not fully fleshed out. The Government already has a contract to procure 100 per cent renewable energy, is my understanding, but this would be a more direct way of supporting onshore. I think that that is also very welcome. The strategy, the cloud change plan pathway, depends on at least a doubling and I think a travelling on onshore wind to 2032, so how is that going to happen? We know that the UK Government is unlikely, the current Government is unlikely to offer any more support for onshore wind, so this is a necessary consequence of that pathway, I suppose. I think that we're lacking details about the Government-owned energy company and exactly what the risks and liabilities as well as the advantages are of doing that. Ultimately, the Government then becomes the risk manager, the risk taker rather than private companies and so on. I think that that needs a closer look at. I think that that is one of the key issues around the whole of energy strategy at a UK level and a Scotland level, a European level of the last few years, about the management of risk and uncertainty. Up till now, renewable electricity seems to have been the most cost-effective way of trying to get some decarbonisation of energy use, but the technologies have had some uncertainties associated with them. There have been costs where there have been higher than the kind of fossil fuel-based alternatives, but largely as a result of policies that have been put in place, those costs have come down. It is realistic to talk about subsidy-free on-shore wind or solar PV or whatever in the right kind of circumstances. The trick comes well all right, but how do you still enable the investment in these kinds of things to take place? The UK Government has not been afraid of intervening and has not left it entirely to the market. The capacity market that you would have heard about in the news this past couple of days in which the auction is taking place and bids should be submitted in the next few days is one example. The contracts for difference auctions are another example, so the central procurement of certain volumes with guaranteed prices is a way of de-risking and of facilitating the investment. In a way, that kind of step has already been taken, which means that the idea of a subsidy-free central procurement point has already been acknowledged to an extent. It is less about what the subsidy is in inverted commas than about how to facilitate the investment. As Mark says, who is picking up risks associated with that? There are still uncertainties, as we have already mentioned, about the whole energy system and what is the most cost-effective way of decarbonising it, and what we commit to in the short-to-medium term. If you are going to commit to anything like this and enable the investment, a longer-term contract seems to be necessary. We hear that all the time in terms of flexible demand or about electricity generation capacity or whatever it happens to be. Longer-term contracts seem to be reasonable, but then there is always a risk that you might have some stranded assets. You commit yourself to a contract that, with the benefit of hindsight, turns out not to have been quite the cheapest way of doing it. Who bears that kind of risk? Arguably, that is the sort of risk that you socialise, because the whole decarbonisation reliability and affordability agenda suggests that it should be socialised. We need to get into the detail of how we do that and how we meet the cost of it. In other words, what split of the bill goes where. That is absolutely the right thing for policy makers to talk about. Again, an example of that is the renewables financial mechanisms to date have been imposed on billpayers. Your part of the total cost is proportional to how much energy you use. We hear people saying that it should be on a basis of tax. That is a perfectly valid debate to take place. It is a sort of thing that I would look to the likes of you to engage with as part of our political representation. It seems to me that if you have a Government-owned energy company and if it was capitalised appropriately, it could take more risk in getting in earlier with technologies that the market might not support. I am thinking about WAVE, where we have seen problems in getting that off the ground for lack of investment from the market. Although you have said that we do not maybe need to pursue new technologies as such because we have technologies that could work, it seems to me that there might be opportunities there if we have different modes of investment. Different modes of investment already? WAVE is a long way off, by the way. Just because we have technologies that seem to be what we might talk about, grid parity in terms of overall cost, does not mean that there is not a need for innovation. Clearly, there is enormous potential offshore for the harvesting of energy. Unfortunately, it is the same energy that tends to break the machinery. There are issues there, but the mechanism that you have put on that, because it is still quite low technology readiness level, would be a different mechanism with a different perception of risk, let us say. The system as a whole is still one of those big issues to be addressed, not just about what the right pathway is, and we have talked about that already, but just if you limit it to electricity, which is my specialism, 100 per cent renewable electricity system is highly challenging. If you happen to have the right geographical resources that you can have lots of hydro in that, then it is great, fantastic, go for it. You have lots of that flexibility. One of the massive challenges is the huge disparity between the demand for heating in winter and the demand for heating in summer, and the total energy does not tell you the whole story. We have to actually look at the time dimension of it as well, and then the spatial dimension, because you have to get the energy from one place to another. In that lie, I think that the need for further innovation and further research to finally get the reliability that we want at least cost while staying within a particular carbon trajectory. If we are looking ahead and we are seeing more electricity demand, so I am thinking electrification was maybe some further rail lines. I am thinking about people who might be placing orders for electric cars, which that could take off if we are trying to decarbonise heating for domestic and non-domestic, and people are switching to electricity for that. Do you think that the assumptions that have been made about the demand looking into the future are about right? I think that the whole energy system model that we have been talking about and criticising a little bit, but it is a good way of informing the debate, starts from energy services rather than necessarily. It is a particular number of megawatt hours of electricity, a particular number of megawatt hours of gas or hydrogen or whatever it happens to be. Yes, there are some uncertainties about the energy service demand, and that is a point that I think that Mark made about the inelasticity of it. These sorts of models tend to take the energy service demand as a given, so clearly there are feedbacks that go on within society and within the economy that that is not actually completely the right answer. There is a need for a more sophisticated modelling that iterates with other sorts of models. In principle, if you believe the way that times are set up, it optimises quite how you meet that heat need, whether through electricity or through burning hydrogen or whatever it happens to be. As I said earlier, that is where some of the uncertainties are, because we are not totally sure about some of the relative costs. We are not sure about the deliverability in terms of the whole supply chain, for example, but at least it gives us a set of potential pathways that allow us to dig in in more detail and test the assumptions. I see the value of something like times modelling as not being in terms of answering questions, but in helping us to know the next questions to ask. I will answer the question on demand specifically, but there was another point about risk that I wanted to make without trying to work in as well. On demand, looking at sector by sector, for electricity, we are getting pretty close to the 100 per cent target. The future growth of low-carbon electricity is based on assumptions of export, predominantly to our UK, which makes a lot of sense at the GB and UK times level. That is all consistent economic least cost approaches to decarbonisation. For the other sectors, I would say that, again, in the absence of a lot of evidence published in the plan, it seems to me that the demand reductions for residential and non-domestic buildings are very modest. If I got this right, it suggests a 6 per cent reduction in residential heat demand by 2032 and 10 per cent for the non-domestic sector. We have already seen quite dramatic changes in heat demand residential and non-residential over the past 10 years, partly because prices have been doubling for heat, but there is also suspicion that this is partly about efficiency measures and so on. I think that the prospect of going further on heat demand reduction is not sufficiently recognised in the plan as it stands. That is important, not only because it is the least cost way of doing the job of decarbonisation, but it also makes the business case for heat supply infrastructure investments. It changes the economics of that. If there is less demand to service, the case for building loads of new heat infrastructure, however whatever it is, electrical or heat networks or even gas grid repurposing, that all becomes weakened. There is less demand out there. We need to get demand right. I think that that is where the whole system strategy should start with a serious look at demand levels, what can be managed out of the system and what is realistic. We do not, without expecting this to be a silver bullet, and we have a problem of rebound effects, but we know that demand reduction is already happening in heat. It is very pretty dramatic. The other point that I just wanted to make about risk is that because we have a very ambitious overall carbon envelope here to 2032, and because the carbon envelopes are concentrated on heat and electricity particularly, the trajectories are now significantly ahead of where the UK sees itself in the heat sector and the power sector. We are waiting for the UK Government's carbon emissions reduction plan, which is due, I understand, in March, but we already have the evidence that Scotland is embarking for example on a heat transition at least five years ahead of where the UK Government and the latest discussions from the department see the heat transition. The implications of that are that there might be some advantages in doing that, getting ahead of building your supply chain up. I am sure that there are advantages in a transition. If Scotland is going ahead on heat ahead of the UK, are we able to socialise the costs of that infrastructure around the whole of the UK? There is an issue there. It also means that the power sector trajectory is seeing the earlier introduction of CCS than the UK Government envisages at the moment. I do not think that that is going to change. We have not heard that much by way of the UK Government published an industrial strategy, which notably avoided saying anything about CCS. It talked about lots of other things like e-vehicles and smart power. It did not say anything about CCS. I do not think that I am going to turn around in the near term on CCS. I think that we need to try to support CCS at the UK level, but it means that the Scottish trajectory on power and heat is exposed to a lack of effort at the UK level. How is that going to financial implications of that if we are just socialising around the Scottish economy rather than the UK economy? That really needs thinking through in terms of the macroeconomic consequences. Just to echo the points that have been made, I fully agree that the ambitions on demand reduction seem modest. I was here for the previous session where one of your witnesses held up that very interesting graph looking at the projections from RPP 1 and 2 versus the current plan, and it looks at less ambitious, followed by a very ambitious fall-off from 2025, much less ambitious previously. Managing the electrification of heat and transport requires us to think very hard about how we can improve the fabric of our homes as much as we can, as quickly as we can, so that we are not wasting that heat in the first place or so that the demand for heat is reduced in the first place. On that respect, we think that the plan broadly does not go far enough. There are still 1.5 million homes below a C standard in Scotland, so a lot more can be done and a lot faster. Transport, we have not talked about much, but the plan is broadly reliant on electrification. It primarily focuses on technological change in the transport sector. That looks like a clear policy decision, but modal shift and promoting modal shift, whether that is to active travel, whether that is to public transport, whether that is freight consolidation in other areas, is a critical component of ensuring that the demand on the electricity system is manageable going forward. Just on the issue of heat pumps, our report that I mentioned earlier by Ricardo Energy and Environment introduced the vast bulk of the heat pumps that it introduced were hybrid heat pumps, so hybrid electric and gas, to reduce the peakiness on the system at certain times. That is a possibility, that could be a technology that will form part of the mix. The CCC has said that it could be a transitional technology, but there are other ways of managing this demand. Getting the demand down in the first place is what we need to concentrate on. Gillian Herding wanted to come in and then a brief follow-up from Gordon MacDonald. I just wanted to briefly add to that. We have focused on the risk associated with being more innovative and so on. I think that it is important to note that the role that community energy, or at least types of projects, is playing aside from the local energy economy benefits that are associated with them, just in terms of communicating those really quite complex technical systems and so on. In that sense, it would be vital to focus on the positive aspects of community energy as well in moving towards the demand reductions that we need to see from various sectors, how those are normalised, how those are socialised through peer-to-peer learning and so on, which comes about from the practical on-the-ground solutions that people can see in their neighbourhoods or in their local areas. Previously, we focused on the Highlands and Islands, and a lot of those projects are within the Highlands and Islands or in rural communities. However, as we are moving to more local projects, such as the Tower of Power project in Edinburgh, for example, where we are approaching people who will traditionally be involved in those types of projects or people whom we have a social obligation to reach out to, we can transfer that message into much more broader areas of influence as well. To go back to the point that Mark Winskell raised about the UK Government and how Scotland is five years ahead and the impact that the UK Government could have on the climate change plan and the targets that we have achieved, I am thinking of the evidence from the existing Homes Alliance that says that, in order to go to a low-carbon heat technology, it says that it relies on the UK Government to make decisions on the long-term future of the gas network. In terms of transport, emissions standards and excise duty are very much still a reserved matter for the UK Government. In industry, it is the UK Government that is looking at climate change agreements and climate change levees. What is the role of the UK Government in that plan and are they acting as a break rather than supporting it moving forward, given that five-year difference? Again, we just do not really know how much ambition is going to be built into what we see in the carbon emission reduction plan. I think that that is absolutely critical to the feasibility of what we are seeing in the Scottish climate change plan. I probably know most about heat because I have been looking at that for a couple of years now. I agree with what was said by the existing Homes Alliance that the heat problem has become the focus of attention for the UK Government, as well as the Scottish Government. That is not just a Scottish Government concern, but the evidence on heat and the most affordable decarbonisation approach for heat has really been difficult to pin down. We have moved away from thinking that electrification is the way to do it towards an interest in district heating. In the last two years, the idea of using hydrogen in the existing gas mains and the distribution network has come back into policy interest. I know that the Scottish Government is really looking at that as well. There is some suggestion that is built into a modest amount that is already built into the climate change plan pathway. I think that the Government is looking at a much greater take-up of hydrogen for heating in the energy strategy out to 2050. The problem is that what we have in the plan is that there is not much happening in terms of getting the deployment of those technologies up to about 2027. We have got seven years of rapid change in the climate change plan, so we have got almost the wholesale transformation of the Scottish building stock within a seven-year period. That is remarkable. I was looking at the penetration rates when we went from town mains gas to natural gas for heating, and it is as quick or about the same speed of transformation. That was using an existing pipeline—there was a backbone pipeline already in place—that they built for the liquid natural gas that they could convert for them, so that was not totally new infrastructure. The fact that Scotland is intending to do that ahead of the UK Government is doing quite a radical transformation. It does not say exactly how much district heating, how much hydrogen we are seeing there, but all three are quite disruptive and costly. There is not an obvious winner among those three at the moment in the evidence and to compress that all into seven years. I am not saying that beyond belief, but what happens before that? What are we doing for the decade from now to 2027 in preparation to make that, presumably, as Keith Brown said, some of this can be associated with the way that the model optimises that it concentrates effort at certain times and you get these breakpoints in the trajectories, which is not quite how things tend to happen in the real world. It means that over those 10 years, we have 10 years' preparation time on heat. There has to be a lot of work on demonstrating those technologies at sufficient scale to make sensible business plans for the mass roll-out of those technologies. We need a proper demonstrator on the idea of hydrogen. There is a lot of speculation. There are a lot of different people saying different things about this. Understanding the appropriate role for district heating, we need some proper scale pilots. I know that SEP is intending to look at supply as well as demand, but I think that demand is more of an obvious area for roll-out than supply at the moment, where the evidence is still missing. I think that there are real risks here. We need more detail about the UK Government. Once we have seen what the UK Government intends to do, we can say how exposed Scotland is going to be in some of those areas. Gil Paterson with a brief supplementary, and then we will move on to John Mason. It was something from this morning's earlier on session. Gina Hanrahan has mentioned something about it, but we could go a bit further. The question was raised, and we talked extensively about heat loss and retrofitting in the private sector and public sector. Although we are doing reasonably well when it comes to the private sector, both with an industry business and in a domestic situation, it is very difficult. My question to you would be what we should do in order to encourage them? Is it the stick or is it the carrot, or is it the regulation that we need? I think that the answer on that is a bit of everything. The SEP programme, which is supposed to deliver this massive retrofit of all commercial and domestic homes over a 15 to 20-year period, should be designed with a mix of measures, and that is the intention. There will be a mixture of incentives, regulation for the private rented sector, regulation long-term for the owner-occupied sector, which includes commercial buildings, and a range of different financial incentives. We can use the capital budget, so it is a whole mix of different approaches. There is a consultation out on SEP at the moment, and the SEP programme has been in development now for about 18 months, as my understanding of the commitment to a national infrastructure priority was made in 2015. What we do not have in that consultation is enough detail on the Government's preferred scenario for SEP, what the balance is between those measures and how much money is going to be put up exactly when regulation is going to come in. I think that seeking clarity on that from the Government would be very useful if the plans for emissions reductions in the residential and services sector are to be fully credible. Did someone else want to make a brief point on that as well? If I may just add one more thing to it, the SEP consultation sets out the intention to introduce regulation for the owner-occupied sector as well long-term. The regulatory proposals were contained in previous RPPs, so we have not seen a massive development of policy on the regulatory aspect. There was a commitment to do this for a long time, and a working group was set up to look at regulation of the private sector as a whole in the last Parliament. It was known as the REAPS working group. Some of you may have been familiar with its workings, and it came close to producing consultation for regulation of all owner-occupied and private sector homes. We need to see that happen much faster, given that it has been in the pipeline for a very long time. John Mason. Just following on from that point, my question is the continuity between the previous RPPs and what we are now seeing in the climate change plan. There have been some suggestions that, for example, in heat, we have made progress, we are easing off and then we are going to make more progress in the future. However, overall, how do you see the continuity of this? Is this a big change that we are looking at now, or is it very much continuing what we have been doing already? They have been produced in different ways. I was involved in consultations on RPP2 in Parliament, and we were making the criticism then that it was very difficult to get a level of consistency across the sectors in terms of how the information was presented and how justification for the proposals and policies was set out. The idea of doing it this way with an integrated model was to make that all more consistent. There is a nice level of consistency about the way that sectoral information is presented. Some of the things have not changed, so however you do this, whether it is a bottom-up sector-by-sector approach or a more of optimising across the whole system, there are some consistent messages about electricity first, the low-hanging fruit in terms of decarbonised power and so on. RPP2 also had ambition around CCS. I remember that we made the very same criticism that there is a lot of expectation. I think that RPP2 had CCS coming in the mid-2020s to a significant level, and we know that that is quite unlikely. We have moderate amounts, I think, even in the late 2020s, in the CC plan for CCS. I do not think that the fundamentals change, really, however it is done. Although we have been quite critical in many of the specifics, I think that we welcome an attempt to try and integrate policy across the energy space and across climate change and land use. That absolutely should lend greater transparency. I think that we are struggling because we have not had all the data and the information that has gone into the Government's thinking. I think that what happens with the system model starting at the integrated version first is that it then goes to the policy teams and it goes to Government sub-committee, and they will then put a feasibility imprint on it. You end up with something rather similar. We are not saying that the move to using a more integrated version from the outset is at all unwelcome. I think that that is welcome, but it has its own strengths and weaknesses. Broadly, I would just want some more information so that we can see what are the sensitivities involved in the CC plan. A clear message that seems to be emerging from all of us is about a lack of detail. There is a detail in terms of how did this pathway come about. As I said at the beginning, it is good to have an ambitious target, but it needs to be achievable, even if achievable at a stretch. Let us see how far we are stretching ourselves in the different sectors. I think that we have all touched on that in different ways. Another aspect of the detail is about the implementation. What concrete steps should be taken now, and some of the questions that you have asked to address that point, Gillian has talked about in relation to community energy, about the building sector and so on. It is about the implementation. That is what we have not seen yet. If what has been published so far is the starting point of a further process of deliberation, analysis and debate about the implementation, when we finally get some concrete steps, then it will have served a very useful purpose. To return to the question about the UK Government, this is one of the tricky bits. That level of policy has an enormous influence on this. It is a key part of the implementation of any of this. There is only a certain amount that we can do. Within Scotland, we can make certain choices that will have social and economic impacts. There are cost implications to a lot of these possible pathways. Many of them, over the medium to longer term, have an economic benefit. We have not seen an analysis that fleshes that out, but other studies have suggested that there is, and it feels like there should be. Even for those, there is a question of finance. How do you unlock the money? How do you unlock the investment? Who takes on the debt in the short term? Those are perfectly reasonable things to try to discuss, but there is the possibility that, by embracing a very ambitious target that is out of step with our immediate industrial competitors, we impose some costs on ourselves. That is a choice that we can take, but we should take that choice with our eyes open in relation to the potential benefits on health, empowerment, the general environment, etc. Does that cut that short? The next step is more detail. If I may aid the committee's scrutiny by suggesting what kind of more detail we should see, in addition to all the things that Keith and Mark have spoken about, things that we have lost from the previous RPP include clearer Bateman figures. There were tables at the back of the epic RPP that set out what each policy was doing each year in terms of emissions reduction. That was very clear. It was good in terms of monitoring. You could see what was supposed to be doing what when. We do not know at this stage either the relative contribution of individual policies or exactly what is happening over the timescale, so clearer figures on that would be useful. There were costings in the last RPP, which we do not have any more. Essentially, what budget would be attributed and what individual policies would cost. I think that a little bit more clarity on that would be useful. Of course, more clarity on the time's outpours, as we have discussed, as well as new policy. You have mentioned about the lack of detail. In a sense, there has been a change in mood or fashion or swing. In the past, the assumption was that we should put everything on to electricity because that would be good. One or two of you have said that that does not seem to be quite the way that we are going now. It seems to me that, while leaving aside carbon capture and storage, the district heating system seems to be a bit of a flavour of the month. Are we all convinced that that is definitely the way to go? I think that we had evidence previously that the UK individual boiler in a house system is quite efficient. Are there really gains to be made with district heating systems? The evidence on heat is really mixed. I spent quite a bit of time looking at what different people are saying about the relative attractiveness of the different options on low-carbon heat. We are at a stage where every option on heat has its advantages and disadvantages. District heating is getting a lot of interest in the Scottish Government and the Scottish sort of energy community. I think that there are dangers there. I think that that is where we do need. Some of the scenarios suggest that it is a very expensive infrastructure commitment. When you start putting the infrastructure in, it becomes a very expensive step-by-step approach to getting the infrastructure in. There are also concerns about where is the low-carbon heat coming from. Heat networks are essentially a heat pipe in the ground, not connected to anything specifically. The way that they tend to be used at the moment is a gas, CHP, combined heat and power engine. The carbon savings that you get from running that, assuming that you get your electricity decarbonisation. By the time that you get your electricity decarbonised—and electricity is pretty well decarbonised already in Scotland—a district heating running on a conventional gas engine does not provide any carbon savings. Is one boiler—it would strike me as a non-expert—one big boiler is going to be more efficient than 20 little ones? Well, it would if you were just starting from, let's build something from scratch. We spent a long time in the UK getting an efficient national system of transmission and distribution and domestic scale boilers. The implications of going from individual household to a community scale heat system is quite a disruptive change for the UK. That needs to be factored into the pathway. A lot of the groups have been doing—I think that one of them is actually referenced in either the energy strategy and the climate change plan—some work carried out by KPMG looking at different vectors for heat. That is quite cautionary on district heating, but it is one of a number of studies of that kind. It is not that district heating doesn't have my role. It is likely to have a role in certain areas for certain types of housing, stock and for new build, especially. I was at a meeting in London looking at heat and somebody from the new department head of strategy there was saying that the UK Government does not have a good grasp of the evidence on heat. He did not quite say that, but he said that we need to really get to grips with the evidence, we need to own the evidence and we need to make some kind of sensible judgments on heat. I do think that that is the same problem for the Scottish Government. One thing that I will say briefly is that, at the same time as we have the energy strategy consultation, we have specific sector-specific consultations. Gina mentioned the seat consultation. We have an onshore wind consultation. We have also got a local heat and energy efficiency consultation. Those are quite specific. The local heat consultation is talking about granting regulating heat in a new way. Local authorities will have the power to create heat zones where district heating will be the preferred technology. What is called concessions will be granted, so it is compulsory to connect within certain parts of local authority areas. What I find is that there is a bit of a disconnect between what we are saying at a system level on the heat problem, where there is a lot of uncertainty and we need to spend quite a bit of time on demonstration and trials and looking at the evidence systematically. What is happening at the regulatory level and at the local authority level has quite a lot of ambition already going ahead in terms of designating areas for preferred technologies. I do not see those joined up very well. I would like to hear from the Government exactly how they are joining those two things up, what they think at the system level and what they are doing in terms of planning at the local authority level. We have heard quite a bit about the decarbonisation of electricity use and that we are almost 100 per cent reliant on renewables, but that overlooks the nuclear question, does it not? As things currently stand. I wonder whether you would like to reflect on where that is and where you think that might go in the future. Something that was also alluded to by Dr Winskill in the passing was the fact that we are part of a GB electricity grid and energy market. Do you have a view on the extent to which we can credibly measure CO2 from the Scottish system if we are part of a bigger grid that might contain CO2 elsewhere in it? Mark was quite careful in his use of words about low carbon, which would include nuclear. We depend absolutely on being part of a bigger system to be able to say that the amount of electrical energy that we generate in Scotland in a course of a year equals or exceeds the total amount of electrical energy that we consume in Scotland in a course of a year because there are times when we have a surplus of renewables plus nuclear and times when we have a deficit. We depend on being able to balance out that surplus of deficit as part of a bigger system. GB depends on being part of a bigger European system and that, albeit the capacity at the moment is relatively limited. That balancing possibility in time and space is really important to be able to maximise the efficient utilisation, cost-effective utilisation of the resources that are there. In terms of the stability of an electricity system in the future, that remains a critical part. This is where there is some debate to be had about the cost-effective way of doing that. Flexible demand has a big part to play in it. More interconnection capacity with the wider continent of Europe has a big part to play in that. Pump storage, other forms of storage, energy storage, when we come back to the bigger energy system picture has a big part to play in that. In a way, we haven't seen nothing yet by the time we try to decarbonise heat. This is why it is getting so much attention now. It also offers some opportunities if we can store heat or the energy that is used for heat. It is pretty low-grade energy. We are not doing an awful lot with it. If that heat demand can be dealt with, then the cleverest stuff that we do with electrical energy, we can do that. Just to briefly point out what Mark was making earlier about the comparison between district heating and condensing boilers, the energy efficiency should be better when you do things at a bigger scale. However, the cost-effectiveness of delivering a certain amount of end product, which in this case is heat, may be different because of the sunk cost of the infrastructure or the need to build up a certain infrastructure. That is where it becomes a tricky judgment to make in respect of the electricity system as much as anything else. Some amount of schedulable generation—let's put it that way—still seems to be very important, at least on a GB basis. Actually, there were good arguments for saying that schedulable generation within Scotland is important in terms of, for example, dealing with extreme weather events and the possibility of needing to black-start the system. Schedulable could include hydro, could include interconnectors using the right kind of technology, it could include another kind of nuclear plant, albeit with much less degree of flexibility. It might include CCS. Black-start could be achieved if it happened to be wanted to do it on a windy day, and it would make use of that. It gets a little bit more complex to think about what the right investment strategy is and the right mix of technologies is. Would anyone else like to come in on that? I think that Gina Hanrahan. The current power system relies on 35 per cent nuclear generation in Scotland, and that has increased as other coal plants have closed. I think that the assumptions are that those will—I am not sure what the retirement lifetimes are of those, but I think that we are relying on those for most of that period in the climate change plan. Nuclear plants have been given lifetime extensions, so there is maybe a rather hidden reliance on— Is that a 27-year plan? Yes. Can't remember when Torne S is supposed to go 20-30 years. 20-30 years. I understand that we would have gone before that. I suspect that the assumptions are for continued operation of both plants out to 2030 and the lifetime of the climate change plan. My understanding is that the CCC scenario for the power sector for Scotland, which was produced in its March report, assumed nuclear phase out by the early 2030s by 2030 and showed that Scotland could remain a net exporter over the course of the year. We, as WWF, unsurprisingly don't support the need for continued or new nuclear beyond that point. We have an evidence base that shows that Scotland can play to its renewable resource strengths as part of a GB grid. Integration is critical, and grid reinforcement to deliver that is absolutely part of the picture, along with demand reduction, flexibility and storage. There are a plethora of different interventions that we can make to ensure that we deliver security of supply, and it shouldn't always be generation first as the principle that we operate on, particularly given what's happening around Hinkley, the price that's been awarded to it. We certainly should not be banking on delivering new nuclear for Scotland or life extending forever. We don't need to. I think that if there are no further questions from committee members, that's the conclusion of this session. Thank you very much to all of our witnesses for coming today, and I'll now suspend this sitting and we'll move into private session. Thank you very much.