 Y next item on the agenda is consideration of whether taking items 5 and 6 in private. Item 5 is consideration of evidence that we will hear today as part of our inquiry into Scotland's electricity infrastructure. Item 6 is to consider correspondence relating to the appointment of the board of environmental standards Scotland. Do we agree to take those items in private? We are agreed, That is an evidence session as part of our inquiry into Scotland's electricity infrastructure inhibitor or enabler of our energy ambitions. That is a new inquiry, the aim of which is to scrutinise what electricity infrastructure will be needed to realise the ambitions set out in the Scottish Government's new draught energy strategy and trust just transition plan. share inquiry leading to a report to the Scottish Government as it finalises its strategy. Today we will hold the first evident session for the inquiry with two panels comprising a wider range of interests in energy. I am pleased to welcome Stuart Hazel Queenzzed Professor of Carbon, capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh. Claire Levell, the director of energy and advisory leader North of Arab, Emily Rice Scotland's policy analyst for Solay Energy UK and Tom Quinn, the head of analysts insights offshore renewable energy catapult. Thank you for accepting our invitation to be here today. We have a series of questions that we will move straight on to, but before we do, I'd like to remind members and people listening that as a farmer and a landowner, I have electricity transmission lines across my farm, both in the form of 11 kV, which are the small ones, 33 kV, which are the bigger ones, which are ring mains, and I'm in negotiation with a 132 kV power line to go through the farm. Both all of them will generate some income at some stage for me, so I want there to be no doubt that I have some interest and I will make that declaration as and when it's appropriate. I don't believe it, it prevents me from doing my job as convener today. The first questions today are going to come from Liam Kerr. Thank you convener and good morning panel. I'll throw this question initially to Tom Quinn, if I may. It's about what we might call baseload and non-intermittent generation. We know that in Scotland nuclear generated energy is due to finish by, I think, 2030. The draft energy strategy says that there will be no new oil and gas E&P going forward. So, from where do you think that the non-intermittent generation will come? Given that just something that I saw on the 17 March, Torones was producing, I think, 42 per cent of the electricity produced in Scotland, when do you think that replacement will actually happen? What we are looking at is the huge opportunity for offshore wind primarily in Scotland, although our focus is obviously on all offshore renewables, so tidal and wave energy as well, but the biggest focus for us is on offshore wind. Obviously, this comes with issues. There's a huge opportunity in terms of building this out because if we're looking at an electrified system, electrifying everything in Scotland, so this is from domestic heating and everything else, it comes along with it. The times of year when we're producing the most wind generally is in the winter, and then there's a big opportunity to be heating homes with it through heat pumps and everything through the winter. So, hopefully we'd see actually a nice matching of demand and supply. In terms of the baseload, you've correctly highlighted that there is an issue with intermissancy here. One thing that we are putting as a cast fault quite strongly on is innovation and programmes to develop green hydrogen. There's a lot of work that we've been doing into working at how it integrates both with offshore wind and with the wider energy system, but the hopes are that if we're able to generate green hydrogen using Scottish and UK electricity, clean electricity from offshore wind, and we're able to find ways of storing this, you can manage both short-term or medium-term intermissancy and long-term seasonal fluctuations in demand because you do get periods like we had this winter of several days with low wind, so the idea is that you'd be able to use green hydrogen to bridge that gap. Obviously, there's a big opportunity to hear both in terms of UK jobs, UK economy, benefiting from developing this locally, as opposed to the current system, where we are largely importing a lot of our gas. Thank you for that. Clare Lavel, I'll move to you. Taking that answer, which was interesting but didn't answer something that I posed, which was essentially when does the green hydrogen, when does the solar, when does any other renewable technology get to such a point that we can generate non-intermittent energy such that we have no further need for nuclear generated energy or oil and gas generated energy? I think that it might be helpful to give a bit of a context so maybe to split the forms of electricity supply and demand into intermittent, which our renewables are, baseload but inflexible, which is something like nuclear or biomass and carbon capturing storages and flexible forms of renewables. Looking across the work of the ESO and the Future Energy Scenarios and the Climate Change Committee, they've modelled lots of different scenarios and outcomes of different balances of all of those sets of technologies. What we do have in the flexible bucket are just a vast range of technologies that can offer the solution to matching intermittent renewables. Everything from storage, batteries, pump hydro, hydrogen power production and interconnection will all, in a UK-wide system, be able to manage our supply and demand. What we need is a very careful transition to make sure that, as generation comes offline, as the demands of our energies shift to increasing electrification, we make sure that the uptake of all of the next set of technologies that are going to help us to manage that flexible system come online. That is part of the work of the ESO to do wider system planning and to understand how that plays out in a Scottish context in the selection of technologies and solutions that we need to make the Scottish market work within the context of the wider UK market. Final question from me in this section is from Emily Rice. The Climate Change Committee was rightly mentioned there by Claire Lavel. It has said, among many interesting things, that there will be more frequent and more intense weather events going forward as we become more subject to the renewable energy generation. Do you think, Emily, that there is a risk that if we put so much development and time into renewable technologies such as solar and move away from things such as nuclear and North Sea oil and gas, that we are increasingly subject to the risks that the Climate Change Committee has warned us of and that our energy security is threatened? Thank you for the invitation and thank you for the question. I do not think that renewables threaten our energy security at all. I would say that climate change threatens our energy security far more than renewable energy does. I also do not think that variable is a better term for solar than intermittent. Our technologies are variable. Certainly, one thing that we are very lucky about in Scotland is that, when it does not tend to be too windy, it is sunny. When it is not sunny, it tends to be windy. We have natural resources that help to balance each other out. With large-scale storage technologies that work very well with solar energy and wind energy, I do not think that moving to a completely renewable generation will threaten our energy security at all. The next question is from Mark Ruskell-Mogg. If I can just pursue that a little bit more. Clare, you were talking about there being a sort of bucket of flexible technologies that can be deployed, kind of dispatchable technologies. Is there a route to market for each of those? You mentioned pump storage, thermal generation as well, which could involve CCS, battery technologies. Is there an effective route to market for those? Are there some that are more far-market than near-market? I would say that there are emerging routes to market. For some of those, the market opportunity is near and established for other ones such as pumps, pump hydro storage. There is an emerging route and an engagement that is going on with UK Government to be able to identify those full routes to market, but there is not yet a fully established route. If I take hydrogen as an example, the UK Government has started to develop hydrogen business models. It has identified funding to be able to support the first set of blue and green hydrogen projects coming to market. There is a route to market for the first tranches of development, but there is more work to be done to develop other aspects of the hydrogen economy. For example, things such as transportation and storage of hydrogen at a wider scale are not yet being developed, and it is still in progress and in consultation with the market. There is an emerging position, but we do not yet have the final solution. Stewart, can we go to you and we will take the rest of the panel? On the same question, I am usually more concerned with storage on the longer duration timescale. I have talked quite well about storage for balancing electricity on sort of minutes hours, a couple of days, whereas I am much more interested in providing storage between summer and winter, or storage for a week of low wind weather. We know that, at the moment, we do that by pumping harder on our methane gas supplies so that we do not really see the need for storage. However, as we shift more to this mixed system where there is no inherent baseload, you are always balancing the different types of energy supply. I see that there will be a much increased role for storage in the future, and that is probably going to be chemical energy at a very large scale. Chemical energy could be described as methane, but many countries store methane in Europe. However, we will probably be looking at hydrogen storage, as Claire said. We are doing a lot of work in the University of Edinburgh on hydrogen storage, and it looks extremely feasible, both in sandstone rocks and salt rocks. However, the problem for Scotland, if we take a very parochial view on that, is that there is not much storage available geologically in our part of the UK. Again, we are going to be driven to a UK solution to that on a UK-wide storage. Just to highlight the quantity of storage, Scottish Gas Networks and DNV have recently done a report that suggests that if we consider the whole energy system for heating and electricity in the future, not just electricity, we will need to store something like 15 to 25 per cent of our annual energy, which is a huge amount, but it is similar to what countries such as Germany, France and the Netherlands store just at the moment with a gas supply. That is in progress, as we say, but it is going to be needed much sooner than the progress is suggesting at the moment. One of the things that the committee could ponder is, should we be moving ahead much faster with hydrogen, because whichever way you look, hydrogen is going to be part of the system. It is a no-regrets option to be investing in hydrogen now and within the next two years, rather than waiting until 2030. Back to a bit more depth in hydrogen later on, but Emily, can we go to yourself? Certainly. Solar is quite a mature technology. I wouldn't say that it's an emerging one, but we do. It is a technology that I think works uniquely well with storage as well. If we are still speaking about emerging markets and things, solar is, as I said, a mature technology. It is incredibly versatile. It works in businesses, homes, utilities and scale, especially on the residential side of things. We are seeing some interesting pilots and routes emerging to help to reduce the cost of electrification of heat with solar and storage to reduce demand peaks across Scotland, but also to help consumers who may not be able to immediately install a heat pump to soften their energy costs of electric storage heating and things like that. We are also seeing some innovation in terms of agri-pv, so using solar panels to protect especially soft fruits like raspberries on the east coast. Solar can be installed above those. We are really hoping that those kinds of solar continue to find routes to market, but that we also see growth in utility-scale solar in Scotland. I agree with what Stuart was saying about using that for seasonal storage of hydrogen. One thing that I would say is that green hydrogen is not the silver bullet that will solve all our problems. It is almost the last thing that it does after you generate a megawatt Arab electricity from a wind turbine. You want to use that as effectively as possible, so the most effective way is to put it into a heat pump and use it for whatever power demand you need. Once you get beyond that point and you have no effective use for it, it would be curtailed that you start looking at generating hydrogen or coming up with alternative uses. At the moment, it is getting slightly into the market side, but there is not necessarily an incentive for wind powered developers to start developing electrolyzers. At the moment, they get paid, they are CFDs, and they get paid their set amount for every megawatt hour that they generate. However, when we look at a broader market, that is when you start seeing shifts in wholesale price and opportunities for businesses to start developing green hydrogen production facilities when prices are low. If we were able to go more to a hydrogen system, and I know that the member is going to ask this afterwards, would that get rid of the need for constraint payments, which are quite big? Yes, it depends where the electrolyzers are cited, because you could have a system where they are centrally centralised and you have power from all over the country that is excess power that goes to them. The other alternative is that you are generating them at the wind farm sites, and then finding ways of, again, like Clare O's saying, that you have to transport them to hydrogen to market. Very briefly, Clare, if you want to come back, you can give me the good news constraint payments and they are longer paid. In all of these, there is a market solution and there is a technical solution. All of these range of technologies can help with the technical solution, which can be investment in more infrastructure, but it can be use of those various technologies to remove the constraint. The constraint payments are part of the market design, so you also need to assess the impact on the market design to be able to remove the use of constraint payments. Both have to be considered in parallel. I always think that it is difficult justifying payments for doing nothing, which I think are public find difficult as well. Sorry, the next questions come from the deputy convener, Fiona Hyslop. Good morning, thank you for joining us. I would like to discuss wind power and the readiness of the electricity network. What do you think are the key barriers to achieving the ambition for offshore wind contained in the draft energy strategy from the Scottish Government? Could the readiness of the electricity network to accommodate new projects affect the business case for the proposals? Is that what needs to be done to our electricity network in the short, medium and long term? Will we come to you first, Tom, and then to Stuart? There are a number of barriers to achieving the targets that have been set out by the draft energy strategy. We are probably less focused on the transmission side of the offshore renewable energy catapult. We obviously see that there are constraints. There are various solutions to this that we are investigating, such as high-voltage DC cabling and potential east coast connectors between Scotland and demand centres where they are in the south of England. There are other barriers that we also need to address, such as the readiness for other infrastructure in Scotland, such as ports and manufacturing capability. We need quite high levels of investment in order to create the opportunity here. You can almost view it as that there are two ways of viewing this. One is that, if we do not invest in certain areas of infrastructure such as ports, the projects cannot go ahead because you have to have the ports to be able to assemble wooden turbines and get into site. The other risk is that, if we do not invest in things such as manufacturing, we are going to be losing out on jobs and supply chain growth and the benefits around that. There are some risks on that side. The other challenge that we are seeing is around skills. Obviously, in the north of Scotland, we have lots of oil and gas workers at the moment. In some cases, there is a natural transition for some of those roles into offshore wind, but it is not always a like for like. The roles are slightly different, so we are investigating with industry what the different pathways are and the skills that will be required. On the infrastructure side, we obviously need some fairly significant upgrades in the grid, but there are also other options here in terms of power to power to x. Hydrant is one example of that, but there are other solutions. It is the electricity network that we have particular interests in, so Stuart, if you can focus on that, that would be helpful from your oversight on this. I am not the world's expert on the electricity network in Scotland, I want to say that. From talking to colleagues and from several years of observation, I think that the connectivity through the landmass of Scotland is going to be a big slow blockage in connecting a lot more of the offshore wind into our grid network, because if we are looking at developing the Scotland sweeter projects around the north coast, which is a huge offshore potential, then getting that electricity to the market is really difficult because you need to come through the landmass of Scotland and the established network is nowhere near up to that. The main constraint there is not the engineering, but the actual planning permission rate, if we think about the beauty of any history that we have, then do we want to have another four or five of those? That is going to slow the connectivity of that offshore wind sometime into the 2030s or more. That raises the question about power to hydrogen. A way of getting access to that offshore wind energy is not to transport the electricity, but to take the electricity to shore or to use that offshore to generate hydrogen and then to transport the hydrogen. That is an option. I have not examined that in huge detail, but that is an option. The other obstacle is locational pricing in the UK system, where pricing of electricity generation further and further away from the demand of the population centres is more and more difficult commercially to develop because you have a price penalty placed on you. Those are interlocking and complicated problems, and it is not clear to me how you will break through that to give investors the confidence that they will be repaid in an adequate timescale if they try to connect in any of those larger offshore assets. Thank you for that overview. If I could come to Clare and notice it in our opinion submissions, one of the things that you said is that we would support SSEEN's position that off-gem would benefit from having a more central and explicit statutory obligation to enable net zero. In terms of the electricity network being anticipatory of demand, as opposed to responsive to, perhaps you could give your insight as to what you think is needed for the network in the short-medium long-term? I think that there has been some really positive changes in terms of regulatory reform within the network space just in the last couple of years. In response to the growth and ambition for offshore wind to deliver the work that off-gem has been doing in the holistic network design that looks at much more integrated, efficient networks, looking at longer-term solutions and being confident to invest in the infrastructure that we need considering the long-term solution rather than considering what is cheapest in the short-term, but does not necessarily deliver the most economic solution. A lot of the work that has been happening with off-gem through the Accelerating Strategic Transmission Infrastructure programme has given the confidence to our transmission operators to be able to progress and bring forward infrastructure that is going to be absolutely needed to be able to deliver net zero and is a really positive step forward. The work that was done for those ASTI projects, which are the accelerated projects, was done in the context of what was understood to be leased through the Scotland programme. Roundabout 11 gigawatt was assumed at that point. We now have roundabout 27 gigawatts of new leased projects. We also have further leasing that is coming through the intog leasing round. What was in the regulatory settlement period does not represent the full set of projects that are being leased and progressed at the moment. There is further work, if it needs to be done, to understand what infrastructure needs for those projects. There are some really big challenges. Despite the commitment to deliver that infrastructure, there are still barriers ahead. It represents a fast growth in terms of the amount of major infrastructure that we will be bringing through the system compared to historically. There are some real constraints within the supply chain, both within the technical capability to design and deliver, but the supply of equipment and plant to those projects needs to be addressed. The planning process has represented a significant blocker to bringing projects and expediting through the system, and we need to be much slicker in terms of how we design and progress those projects. I could talk a bit about hydrogen. Can we ask Emily what is needed for solar from the electricity network? First and foremost, I think for solar, having a kind of level of national ambition would be hugely helpful, so setting a deployment ambition by 2030. That's because at the moment solar tends to be a bit of a footnote in dino strategies, so dino's are required to justify all of the investment that they make in their network. At the moment, because there's no signal from the government saying we want this amount of solar to be included in the energy mix, dino's don't account for solar when they're justifying their investment off-gem to the regulator. Without that ambition, solar simply isn't included in dino strategies and it's harder for solar to get grid. As far as the regulatory regime, I completely agree with what Clara said that there's been a lot of progress in the past couple of years, but as it stands, the grid is not designed for the system that we're moving to. Over the past 20 years, the price of renewable electricity has dropped dramatically, and the way that the grid was designed and regulations were set up, the regulator simply weren't expecting there to be a lot of small scale renewable generation connecting to the grid, and so it's just not set up to expedite that process. It's not set up to invest ahead of need, which is really what solar needs. Like every other technology, we just need more investment in the grid. We need more capacity. It's not a question of if you build it, it will come. We are already here and we are asking very much for grid space, so giving the networks that freedom to invest ahead of need, to build out further, to design a grid that's designed for net zero and not try to adapt what we have for the kinds of new technologies that we didn't expect 30 years ago. I saw some nods from the panel there as well. If I can move on to the potential for generation and the market ambition, particularly in relation to hydrogen, I was at Green's Wife in ASC yesterday hearing about their plans with the ACOM project, which was very interesting indeed. Professor Hazeldin, if you could perhaps give us a point-in-time view now as to where you think hydrogen could be and particularly the movement to green hydrogen, and in terms of offshore generation, the balance between going on into the grid or the potential for it to be used for hydrogen. Are we in a different place now than we were perhaps even 12-18 months two years ago? How optimistic are you that we can shift the dial on the hydrogen's side of things? We certainly have plenty of studies happening, plenty of opportunities for hydrogen, lots of enthusiasm for hydrogen, but I still think we need to be cautious or realistic about the availability of green hydrogen in the immediate term because that depends on having the availability of, firstly, of lots of electrolyzers, the equipment that can pass current through water to make hydrogen and oxygen. Those electrolyzers are not yet fully commercially available at the scale and the numbers you need, and you then need a lot of electricity to supply those electrolyzers. Although we're progressing very well on producing lots and lots of low-carbon electricity, as we've discussed earlier in this meeting, then you're going to need even more if you're trying to use that green hydrogen to replace the methane gas. I see that as a slow and continuous progress, but that will possibly take 10 or 15 years to get to anywhere you want to be. I think that we also still need to look at blue hydrogen, which is the hydrogen by splitting methane molecules into CO2 and hydrogen. Obviously, there's a big push from oil companies to sell methane, which could then be split into hydrogen and CO2, so no surprise that oil companies are interested in selling us lots of methane, but we have to be a bit careful. We don't get locked into a cul-de-sac there by investing for 30 years or 40 years of blue hydrogen and squeezing out the market for green, so that as a balancing act to be achieved there, and of course we may or may not come too later at the moment in the Scottish part of the UK here, then we have no ability to take away that CO2 from blue hydrogen to store that, so that ACORN project and the associated Scottish cluster of carbon capture and storage has to be enacted to enable blue hydrogen to exist, otherwise there will be a nation that is exporting all that CO2 by shipping or by pipe down to storage sites further south in England and that part of the North Sea and losing a lot of value. So, in summary, I see green hydrogen progressing, but not immediately fast. The price of green hydrogen in Scotland can fall. It's projected to fall as the equipment becomes more and more standard, as the pricing decreases, the price of green hydrogen projected to fall by about half by the late 2030s, but how fast we get there is not known to me at the moment. And of course there's no pipeline system yet, and that's a clear and present need, which needs to be sorted out. Tom, do you want to comment? Yeah, there's a few areas here, a big focus for us is on innovation. At the moment, the innovation and funding background is a bit scattered, so lots of different sources, and it's not enough to enable us to remove from where we are now from doing feasibility studies through to actually executing on strategies. So there's a requirement for greater funding in the green hydrogen space. I'd agree with Stuart that yes, we need to build this out, we can't do it at the risk of sending electricity to electrolyzers and then having to backfill with more natural gas for power, that doesn't make a lot of sense. There is some demand for hydrogen, it's going to be a little bit difficult to balance the demand and the supply sides. We'd expect once we start to grow a supply that a market would be created around that in order to use the green hydrogen. But yeah, main focus for us at the moment is on that innovation and R&D space. We think it's definitely possible to reach the targets that have been set of it's 5 gigawatts by 2030 and then 25 gigawatts by 2045. It's definitely possible to reach those, but the short-term goals of matching the supply and demand is going to be challenging. Just finally to you any comments on this and it's that balancing between I suppose offshore generation transmission and the potential for green hydrogen and at what point does that get an equilibrium or is that from one of the kind of market challenges? I mean it's a challenging target so 5 gigawatts by 2030, 10 gigawatts in the UK and to give you an idea it took 20 years for the UK offshore wind industry to reach 10 gigawatts worth of installed capacity from a standing start and albeit that that didn't necessarily represent the technology's ability to deliver but the sustained support that you need to be able to grow and accelerate an industry. There are some very mature technologies both in blue and green technology so electrolyser technology has existed for 100 plus years but what we don't necessarily have is deployment at scale and you know particularly for green hydrogen we don't have the pipeline yet that we need although we think that's likely to be emerging with the business model funding. I think one of the really big interdependencies with the network is around the establishment of the future system operator so now we largely plan our electricity network independently of our gas network and the establishment of the FSO is to make sure that we do better system wide planning so we understand how those systems interact and how we can deliver overall much more efficient systems that deliver better outcomes for consumers. The FSO is due to be established 2024 I understand so we're really a little way away from being able to get to the point where we're actually doing that properly efficient system planning and understanding what we need in gas hydrogen networks that complement our electricity networks and that desperately needs to be accelerated so that is not moving at the pace that we need. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Stuart, you made a comment there which I couldn't let slip by about the beauty to denny line and the time it took. Do you think it could have been speeded up if we'd thought about undergrounding it and I will declare that I was involved in it from an environmental point of view? I'm trying to remember back. A large number of the objections were really were certainly concerned with the scenic aspects let's call it or the landscape impact and so I guess you could in principle underground that but I do remember at the time electricity companies provided us with lots of evidence that undergrounding would bankrupt them somehow but these are choices we have to make in terms of planning and that's part of I guess what the political landscape can help with in Scotland but there's no doubt that in any of these things planning is a huge drag on progress and of course you've got to balance democracy and local citizens with what's engineering or technologically feasible. The upgraded power lines will follow the best route which is where the 132KVs are which means that they will not dismantle those till they put up the next one and then they'll want to keep the old ones up as well which a solution is to underground them. It's just an observation. I didn't say that you said that for me just to be clear. Well I'd love you to say it as well. That could be an engineering solution but I'm absolutely not qualified to say if that's a sense of the word. Thank you. I'll just pay the comment. Monica, the next questions are from you. I want to turn back to the draft energy strategy. I note that it doesn't have specific ambitions for marine or solar deployment and on hydro it does recognise the potential role for hydro both at small scale involving local communities and at a larger scale but I just wonder if the panel can explain whether it is important to have specific targets and if so what they should be now. I'll start with Emily because I think you said that solar is a bit of a footnote in the strategy so keen for you to elaborate on that and this question about targets how important is it? Absolutely. When I said that there tend to be a footnote in DNO strategies essentially because we don't have that national ambition although we do have a strong rooftop market in Scotland. When the DNOs, the district network operators look at designing their investments, designing their grids and solar is different from wind and other technologies because it connects at a distribution level most of the time instead of a transmission level. Essentially they have to go to Ofgem with these plans, these spending plans and say this is how we're going to invest our money and this is why and if there's no national ambition for solar there's not evidence for them to say well the industry is telling us that they're going to put in 4 gigawatts of solar by 2030 that's not really a strong enough reason for Ofgem to say yes then you should invest ahead of you know you should invest to plan for that but if the Scottish government says we'd like to have 4 gigawatts of solar by 2030 then Ofgem will say right that's why you're you're preparing your network for that because the government has signaled that they want that to be part of the energy mix. It's incredibly important not only for that kind of confidence for the for the district network operators but also if we're talking about supply chain investing now and things like building up skills you know increasing making sure that we have a good supply chain of things of the materials that we need to to boy that amount of solar it really increases investor confidence to know that there is in fact a supported market in Scotland that you know people can come and invest in. I've had many solar developers say there's a lot of land in Scotland but I'm just not sure about the you know the kind of the planning system and things up there but definitely utility scale is starting to turn towards Scotland as an option so there's a lot of reasons that we think a national ambition is important and grid is certainly an important part of that but so is skills and investing in the sector ahead of 2030. Thank you Emily before I move on to the rest of the panel what would a realistic ambition or set of targets for solar look like in the strategy? Your microphone is open. On solar what would the targets look like if they were to be realistic? What would satisfy you? We believe that four to six gigawatts could be deployed by 2030 and we believe that that is a kind of it's a reaching ambition certainly but it is a realistic one. We've seen record deployment in Scotland in over recent years and the industry continues to take off and with the national planning framework supporting more development of utility scale solar we believe that there's absolutely no reason to think that we wouldn't be able to reach that by 2030. Thank you and I'll come to Tom next just to ask again about specific targets for marine solar and hydro so I don't know if you want to answer across the board or just pick out one. Yeah so I think focusing on the marine energy so the wave and tidal targets have been very useful for offshore wind and we're fully behind the ambition that's a good thing for wave and tidal they're still at a fairly early stage we've seen some kind of smaller scale projects some pre-commercial projects and so setting targets for these is going to be more challenging but the ambition is good what we then need to do is actually get from setting the targets to actually enabling creating all the enabling actions to deliver on those targets so we're supporting government and industry on identifying what the barriers are trying to quantify them and work out ways to remove them but for certain offshore renewables it's almost more important to have an annual target of what you want to be doing in every year rather than having a very big target in 2030 which means we have to build a lot in the short period of time with that having that longer term view of what happens after that have we just overbuilt everything and then are not going to be building more further into the future so it's having that steady clear pipeline of projects that will encourage investors and supply chain and give fitability to the grid and everything else that comes along with it thank you clear yeah just agree i think targets help and signal and intent and the only thing that i would add is i think we also need better system planning so understanding what's going to be delivered and where both in terms of transformation of demand to low carbon solutions and the supply of electricity or otherwise to those systems helps us plan our networks better and there are a lot very long lead infrastructure items so the sooner that we can plan for that the better thank you and Stuart anything to add nothing majorly to add except i believe targets are useful to signal the intent particularly when you're putting in large capacity for the future whether that's a pipeline or whether that's an electricity wire but i'd also say that not everything needs a development target because some of these technologies are still in the in the pilot and demonstration phase they're not some technologies are not ready to build yet okay the technologies that we've just discussed do receive less attention in the draft energy strategy do you think that any or all of them can play a significant role in the Scottish electricity system and today we've heard a little bit about the important role that the planning system can play local government more widely our committee just had a big inquiry into the role of local government in delivering net zero and we had a committee debate last week i'm sure you were all listening in the chamber to that but i'm just wondering if you have a view on how best local authorities can support these ambitions skills that we mentioned planning but is there anything else that you would want to add to that and maybe just come to steward first and go back along the table answering in a very general way i think not on a specific technology but i think local authorities can easily be overwhelmed by the technical asks and the detailed asks which they've been totally unskilled for and totally unaccustomed to so i've often thought it might be useful to have a more central facility in scotland to dispense information and disperse information which cause a group of authorities for example could draw upon that central expertise to help when they're faced with a sudden application for the world's best title development and they know nothing about it how are they going to decide so skills for local authorities and help with them thank you clear yeah i mean planning plays a large part of it and i would defer to scots renewables who you'll meet with in in the later session that i think we'll be able to speak more credibly than i can about the application of the planning system i think maybe the other thing to be aware of is the role of local authorities in the development of local heat and energy efficiency strategies so they play a really critical role in terms of planning for decarbonisation of demand and supply within their local authority areas and i think that that's an area that needs enough appropriate resource to be able to support those local authorities and to be able to implement those plans and i think in particular there's some areas where within their own assets of states that they've got opportunities to really catalyse activity and catalyse investment so i think if you look at hydrogen creating a demand a transport demand for a fleet public sector fleet as an example is it can be something that really helps kickstart some of these new industries and we have seen some example of that in some of our visits to Aberdeen where we saw hydrogen bin lorries for example tom so we work with some local authorities already through some clusters around the UK that are centered around offshore wind development i think you know i can use this opportunity to invite any local authorities that are looking at marine energy and offshore wind as we are independent experts on this so we're always welcome to support on that front thank you and emily yes so the planning system we definitely welcome some of the changes in the national planning framework for again some of these you know encourage local authorities to approve projects that help with government that help reach government ambitions so going back to why ambitions are important having you know that sends a clear signal to local authorities as well i definitely agree with the you know the point that Claire made about resourcing local heat and energy efficiency strategies and also just making sure that local authorities are being able to resource and invest in the skills and the people that they need to kind of to approve these projects to resource these projects and supporting them to invest in skills as well so that the benefits of their renewable transition in terms of jobs in terms of infrastructure stay in those communities thank you thank you very much Monica the next questions come from Jackie Dunbar Jackie good morning and thank you panel for coming along i'm going to go back to hydrogen if you if you don't mind and the draft energy strategy says that scotland strong ambition that scotland has a strong ambition for the hydrogen economy with that in mind what do you think that the potential uses or the markets that we have for hydrogen are adequately understood out there and what needs to be done to allow businesses to invest with confidence clear i'll come to you first yeah i think there's um there's a there's a vast range of solutions where hydrogen can play a role what i would say is that there's a i think there's a kind of hierarchy of interests and you know in particular there are applications where electrification as a decarbonisation solution just doesn't work out it's very challenging so we have a lot of industrial process that needs really high heat that is difficult to do for electrification there's a lot of transport solutions where electric vehicles things like shipping and heavy goods vehicles can't really don't work from an electrification purpose and that creates a significant demand and we should really accelerate and focus on the use in those applications where we know hydrogen is the solution there's some wider debate on the wider range of roles that hydrogen can play in other applications and in particular something like heat you know that there are diversity of opinion about where hydrogen is the best solution but that could have a huge impact in terms of the range of hydrogen that we need to produce and where we need to deploy it and so i think it's really critical that we make some short term decisions and what are the no regrets kind of you know easy win solutions and really accelerate and progress those but we need to really work hard in terms of building the evidence base and deciding the wider set of applications where we're going to use hydrogen okay tom what have you got yeah so so i guess on the market side something that's supported renewable development and deployment over the last 20 years has been the ability to have an off taker of last resort so make sure that whatever you generate is able to be sold and get some revenue for so i think that's something that would be pretty critical for green hydrogen production a potential option for that is the gas grid which can from my understanding not very technical can can absorb some hydrogen into the grid without having to be adapted in terms of the innovation challenges that we're facing we're working with other gas bolts in a hydrogen innovation initiative to help to coordinate and address some of the challenges around all aspects of the hydrogen market and the design of that and i think just finally we're seeing a lot of activity in the EU a lot of funding going towards green hydrogen i think it's quite important that we don't lose out our competitive advantage on this on this front okay this joke do you have anything that you would like to add yeah okay so again i just go back to what we touched on briefly before if we look at the whole system of energy then one of the main storage opportunities for energy between seasons is chemical energy is hydrogen so as well as examining individual examples on a sort of local scale on an immediate scale like claire just discussed i think we also need to bear in mind that larger grid operation scale where hydrogen may be preferred for the security it gives in storage even though in the a particular application electricity sometimes may be better and many places electricity is better so that's one thing considered don't lose sight of the large scale as well as a small scale and i'd totally agree that on vehicles or transport whether it's hgvs or buses or shipping or trains then hydrogen does seem to have strong advantages there and one of the hidden costs we've looked at briefly was that if we install batteries in a lot of these big vehicles then the axle weight increases so you actually end up with a huge amount a huge potential for more road damage which ends up with local authorities as an unforeseen problem so again we need to be wide ranging in our review and but building building centres and fleets is a way of disseminating hydrogen at low risk into the vehicle fleet big vehicle fleet you said earlier that one of the key barriers you felt was that there was no pipeline system in place for hydrogen at this present moment in time how do you think is there anything else that needs to be addressed in regards to the infrastructure or how how can we address those issues well from my perspective on it yes you can tom's quite right you can in principle feed hydrogen into the existing gas grid but we need to be generating that hydrogen somewhere the logical place to do that in scotland would be at St Fergus where the methane comes on shore and you're probably aware of that so at the moment we're stuck on that one but there's also a still if a quite huge design problem if we are to use hydrogen for heat pervasively through domestic housing there's the switch over problem about how you're going to scale up that percentage of hydrogen into the grid and how you're going to convert houses and in some cases how you're going to it's maybe necessary to if you're supplying an electrolyser through the gas grid that electrolyser needs 99.9% pure hydrogen needs really really pure hydrogen so there's also a purification or a polishing of hydrogen for before the final use and all these are actively being investigated but it's not clear who's going to move first when and how it might be useful to split the two different types of gas networks so that there's a gas distribution network that supplies directly to to people's homes for use in heating and cooking and we have gas transmission network which is about bulk transmission of of gas through the country and while certainly there is discussion and debate and a decision not yet made on the role of hydrogen within the gas distribution network in that decision isn't due until 2026 there absolutely is a need to have a gas transmission network that we connect all of our hydrogen production hubs and distribution of hydrogen around the UK and to Europe as well to make sure that we've got an integrated transmission system and that is a decision that we should be making sooner rather than later that's one of the recommendations by the climate change committee that due to the long lead time of that infrastructure that we need to start to progress the plans there is plans for a european backbone there's plans for project union I think there's more of the work that we could do in identifying the production opportunity of hydrogen within Scotland and how that feeds into those wider plans to make sure that that's fully integrated into whatever decisions we make on our gas transmission network the scottish government's ambitions sorry just before you move on to your next question which I don't want to stop you in mid-flow because that's quite keen to come in on a point on on one of the points that's been raised so I'm happy to bring you in then come straight back to you if I may yep thanks very much convener and good morning I just based on what you were talking about in terms of you know I wanted to touch upon district heating systems and not with standing hydrogen but I actually sit on the criminal justice committee one of the things that's come up in the past is using prisoner states as district heating systems in order to deliver you know energy throughout and also you know create a revenue there so I actually wanted to ask Stuart about that as well if you want to comment quickly and I don't want to steal Jackie thunder here and say whoever doesn't look away first well I'll observe we've got we have a district heating system in university of Edinburgh which has four or five different district heating systems in and around the town and the value in that is the efficiency of the centralised heat through methane gas at the moment university is a bit stuck in its decarbonisation and wonder whether to carry on burning gas or to switch to hydrogen or to totally electrify so that's not an answer but it's an example of the difficulty in making a decision of what's going to be the future I don't know if anyone else wants just that all um that there are solutions in heat decarbonisation in electrification heat pumps which are an absolute must and and we should accelerate in heat networks that there are areas where that that makes a lot of economic sense when you can when you can find low carbon sources of heat beside demand and we should accelerate those and I think the wider question is what does the role of hydrogen within heating and are there areas that are difficult to decarbonise by the other solutions that that actually hydrogen plays out um a really key role and what where should we accelerate those so it's really about understanding the best solution for the best application of which heat networks are absolutely one push that as far as I can allow it to go just because of the shortness of time check you back to you thank you it was just to to go back to clear um I was going to ask you a question regarding the Scottish Government's ambitions for five gigawatt of hydrogen production by 2030 and 25 by 2045 how much of that should come from green hydrogen and what's probably the reality if we're going to get to that target so I think in the short term blue hydrogen is considered to be the lower cost and actually we have projects within project acorn that are very well developed that that could provide hydrogen at scale in the context of the 2030 targets they're not currently haven't been selected for funding under the base cluster sequencing process they were put as a reserve project on the track one cluster so there's some uncertainty about the route to funding those clusters and without that funding route that project won't be realised in the longer term green hydrogen is likely to be lower cost Scotland has an absolute excess of renewable resources we've got a huge capacity just in the scotland least sites alone and green hydrogen is zero carbon rather than low carbon so it doesn't create the challenges that you have with blue hydrogen where you have to do some offsetting by other means so I think that green hydrogen certainly has to play a major role in 2030 and absolutely it it should be the dominant solution by the time that we get to the 2045 targets okay does anybody else have I just want to highlight a risk around blue hydrogen is that well one creates an important dependency if you're investing public funds into a hydrogen project it should be green hydrogen because we're not going to be reliant on volatile markets you can obviously see the risk over this winter of relying on international gas markets so I just want to highlight that as a risk of investing in a big way into blue hydrogen we should really be investing in the early stage green hydrogen and creating expertise in that that we can export to international markets okay thank you and my last question convener if I can put it to Stuart can I ask Stuart how critical is it for the Scottish electricity decarbonisation for there to be a Scottish CCS cluster well we've still got this dilemma that we can either have a CCS cluster which is up to the UK government process to decide whether it's awarding funds or not if we have a CCS cluster then we can develop blue hydrogen rapidly we can develop negative carbon emissions by direct air recapture we can develop negative emissions by using our biomass to generate some biomass to generate hydrogen or biomass to generate heat all those options become available if we do not have a co2 storage pipeline then we lose the ability to transfer offshore skills into that and then we will be dependent on shipping to export any of our co2 to another part of Europe whether that's Norway or England so I still see that the CCS part in terms of a net zero a CCS part still essential because let's remember that net zero still permits some emissions from agriculture or forestry or transport or anything else but those will be balanced arithmetically by recapturing carbon dioxide and if we can't send our carbon dioxide away for storage then that becomes a more expensive and difficult option to get to the net zero does that answer your question properly I think what you're saying is you believe it's critical and I don't want you to put words in your mouth when I say that well I think it would be very strange to to have a whole region of the UK deprived of that low carbon facility and if the rest of the panel don't don't have a different view I'll come back to you convener but you've just told them they don't have a different view so if they haven't got anything else to add sorry I don't like putting words in people's mouths no one's jumping up and down and thank you for for handing back because we are short of time I'd like to go to Liam and then come to collect thank you convener I'll pick up that last point Stuart Hazeldine the energy strategy the draft energy strategy has a presumption against new oil and gas exploration and at the same time commits to developing Scottish CCS cluster given the key role that the North Sea fossil fuel companies will play in developing skills and funding of CCS CCS and other renewables is there a risk in your view that the draft energy strategies positioning might hinder development of a Scottish cluster to say nothing of other renewables such as hydrogen so are you asking me in simple language whether we should continue developing oil and gas or are you asking something different I'm asking if the draft energy strategy in presuming against new oil and gas exploration might inadvertently hinder the development of the technologies we've heard so much about well I'm I'm not in the boardroom of major transnational oil companies so I don't see why it would hinder a separate development because they really are although they use similar skills and similar technologies then they're entirely separate projects and so I would my personal view is that if the UK is heading towards trying to become a net zero economy it's actually makes me wonder when we're going to cross that bridge of saying we do we actually do stop gen producing oil and gas and we do switch with a full heart and mind into trying to decarbonise and build that decarbonisation network and so the companies who are actively involved in that at the moment are big transnational oil companies who have you know in these particularly years I think it's clear we've got plenty of cash in the bank so it's choices by them rather than the rather than the skills portfolio they're choosing where to invest their money Claire Lavelle Tom Quinn in just a previous answer talked about the important the the import risks of blue hydrogen your submission talks authoritatively on blue hydrogen and cc us and it highlights their role in the transition for the oil and gas industry but it also notes in your submission that if reliance on gas doesn't reduce at the imports of gas will increase and you talk about the significant risk to security of supply in an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment therefore if we accept that demand for power in the united kingdom is likely to remain high for some time perhaps might increase given certain choices that we make should this aspect of the energy strategy be reviewed the presumption against exploration not only for energy security but also for the development of things like hydrogen I think there's a not simple answer to that and the climate change committee have a position on this that I think is that I will try and replicate as accurately as I possibly can I think it is worth noting that we import significant proportions of our gas supply from the rest of the UK and from outwith the UK basins and the carbon impact of doing that is significant so one of the major issues with gas production is fugitive methane emissions which is a very pernicious global greenhouse gas and which in the short term has a very significant impact on compared to carbon and looking at the global market of gas we do need to be concerned about where we source our gas from outwith the UK because of the issues of high fugitive emissions in other nations at levels above the UK level so it's really important that if we use gas within the system that we are very aware of where we're sourcing that gas from and the wider carbon impacts of that it's very important that if we use gas that we make sure that we abate it at the capture carbon at the point of use but equally there is a general need for us to accelerate as quickly as we can our use of hydrocarbons so we must use less oil and gas within our system to be able to meet our net zero targets and I think we have to consider with caution any existing exploration activity within the UK when it's not when we don't know it to be compatible with those net zero targets so while we do absolutely need to consider security of supply we should also recognise that acceleration of reduction of uses is going to be a much more critical element of that because any additional exploration activity that we do in the UK is unlikely to make us gas independent because of the balance of gas supply that we're using. I would love to let you in, my problem is that I am short of time and I'd appreciate your input but if I stop a committee member getting in I'll have to live with them for future sessions so I'm going to go to Calais. I want to focus in on Ofgem and the energy markets as well and obviously on the back of the recent review of the electricity market arrangements where they touched upon our the proposal is that they decouple gas prices from electricity produced by renewables so are you aware of what operational changes Ofgem recently have made to support the delivery of a decarbonised electricity system and do you think there's more could be done to support a more regulatory regime that delivers a more decarbonised energy supply and you touched upon that earlier when Liam was asking you about important gas and the contractual elements I believe that the UK are in terms of the prices of important gas and I'll ask Clare since you touched upon that as well. Yeah so I'll not talk about the network reform associated with network investment because I've touched on it and you have the network operators later in the afternoon that will speak to that. I think the other thing to be aware of is the review of electricity market arrangements REMA and that really recognises that there are significant challenges with our current market system and is clearly not delivering for generators in terms of being able to access the market but it's not delivering for consumers either because we are paying some of the most expensive electricity prices across Europe as well and that market reform is at a very early stage show it's at consultation stage where there are options on the table which really go from evolution of what we have at the moment to some big transformation looking at at different market models and that review is going to be incredibly critical to the Scottish market. Thanks Clare, can I bring in Tom on that thanks? Yeah we're not particularly close to the regulatory side and off-champ I would just say just to echo what Clare said around REMA it's a spectrum of options and at the moment it seems like the consultation response to say that everything is still effectively on the table and that really highlights what a complex topic this is that there's not a simple solution to it for the offshore wind side of things it's important to talk about decoupling it's important that we're generating a lot of renewable energy in Scotland it would be great for all our consumers to have cheap access to cheaper and affordable power but we need to make sure that we're still incentivising investment in the future projects as well. Okay thanks Emily, do you want to come in on this? Sure, so again like Tom said we're not super close to the regulatory regime and we certainly welcome the kind of some of the changes that Ofgem has made recently overall I think that regulatory frameworks need to be much more agile than they currently are to kind of allow that investing ahead of need in that innovation ahead of net zero. There are some options I think that solar in particular could benefit from and I'm not going to comment on whether these are the absolutely correct options or not but things like decentralising energy networks so using network charging to reward consumers who consume local supply so if you have solar arrays and things like that and that is completely consumed in the community then you're not paying transmission charges for transmission that you don't need to carry that power elsewhere but and this already happens in places like Portugal and France it is an option it would just require kind of that different regulatory regime and as Tom and Claire have said there are a vast spectrum of options everything's on the table right now and we are changing but definitely having that kind of more agile regulatory framework and thinking around some of the more out-of-the-box solutions I think will be important. Okay thank you and lastly Stuart do you want to come in on this? Again I'm not super close to it as the phrase goes but I do think that consumers seem to be getting a progressively worse deal as we shift from 100% fossil to 100% everything else and so anything which gets us further towards effectively a pick and mix menu of cheaper electricity and cheaper power seems pretty sensible because this transition we're only part way through this transition we're going to have to deal with different sorts of renewables, different sorts of methane or gas mixes and so flexibility and adaptability are going to be important but it's also important I think not to go for totally locational pricing because then you'll end up with very expensive electricity in the outlying parts of the UK and so there's a big plus for me about having a postage stamp type of operation where everybody in the UK has a similar price. I'm going to let you have one more question to one person say sorry I'm going to ask you to choose carefully in your question and your answer I was going to say victim but I don't think that's right. So the climate change committee recommended the establishment of a great but wide electricity infrastructure delivery group to ensure that there is effective co-ordination between the administrations throughout the whole of the UK and can I ask do you support this and what should be its immediate priorities in that respect and I'll bring in Claire. Yeah and I think you're probably referring in that context to the establishment of the future system operator so that's the evolution of our electricity system operator to bring in gas and electricity planning and to hold more centralised strategic system plans as well and I absolutely very much welcome that that is what the industry really needs to be able to understand the infrastructure that we need that delivers efficiently that allows us to accelerate net zero but also allows us to be able to deliver efficiently for consumers as well so I think that is well supported by industry and quickly because I'm going to get into trouble from the convener if anyone else wants to come in and comment if not I have absolutely not I'll allow one more person I'll allow one more person um say time to collect I think I think we've probably got that collect and it was it was a nice try and I'm sorry I couldn't let you do that but can I just say uh it's been a really interesting session and I'd like to thank you all uh for for the evidence that you given this morning um and I think the fact that we we started late but we've run on past the time that we would have had originally proves how much uh your evidence was valued so thank you very much I'm going to briefly suspend the meeting till five past 11 to allow a change over of witnesses I suspend the meeting okay welcome back um and I'd now like to welcome our second panel joining us today as part of our inquiry into Scotland's electricity infrastructure inhibitor or enabler of our energy ambitions on behalf of the committee I'm pleased to welcome scott mathson the network planning and regulation director scottish power energy networks uh Aileen McLeod director of business planning and commercial for ss em transmission morag watson the director policy for scottish renewables and joining us remotely as mark howl the chief technical officer for community energy scotland thank you first of all for accepting our invitation uh and I know some of you were present uh during the last session so you would have had the benefit of that we are quite short for time so not everyone will be able to answer every single question um and for those in the room if I if I'm glaring at you it's because I want to bring somebody else in um and to give everyone an equal opportunity to read no more into it than that the first questions therefore come from mark ruskell mark yeah thanks convener um I wanted to come back in on that issue around dispatchable electricity um and what some of the challenges might be in terms of securing a router market so um morag o maybe to start with with yourself here and then if others want to come in i'm fine but I particularly want to ask you about pump storage hydro um but also any other technologies you think where there are particular issues in terms of establishing that clear router market at the moment absolutely so um to pick up on what Claire Bell said in the earlier section there is when it comes to that storage on the grid there are two issues this the technological and how you solve that and then there's the market mechanisms so um if we look at what has come forward in the bay's flexibility plan they're saying we need about 30 gigawatts of flexibility on the system by 2030 pump storage hydro could provide around 10 gigawatts of that it is something that's very distinctive to the geology and geography of scotland so there's a little in Wales but most of that would be in scotland the key reason that we are not reaching investment decisions on that is because you need a finance stabilisation mechanism so these things take decades to build I don't know if anyone saw BBC news this morning but the curry glass is £1.5 billion worth of investment 500 construction jobs but that's over about seven to ten years so you need that patient finance so the UK government put forward a call for evidence in 2021 for how would this be done to which we submitted a cap and floor mechanism which is what you use for interconnectors the big cables that connect us to Europe would be technology neutral but would work for pump storage hydro that was asked for in 2021 and we've been told they may make a decision on it in 2024 so it's not that it can't be done it's just the timescale that's teaching taking to reach a decision that is really problematic for industry scot aileen do you want to come in on on this pump hydro or any other issues around dispatchable technologies I think it's been well covered the only other thing that I would add is that the functional specification of what's connecting to the grid is important as well so renewables can have grid forming technologies associated with them and we need to see commercialisation of things like virtual synchronous machines at the wind farms and clearly batteries of a role in terms of balancing this out as well and about an abundance of battery applications on the system but they've got to be in the right location at the right area to balance out the system appropriately I think more I covered it very well. Clearly as grid developers we're technology agnostic but we are very concerned about maintaining security of supply the report from the climate change committee that was published a couple of weeks ago referred to earlier very much emphasises that whole resilience aspect of the grid so they're focused on technology independently of actually how that contributes towards security of supply and when you're thinking about the long-term planning of the grid and having an understanding of how that security of supply is going to be realised it's incredibly important we're going to keep the lights on going forward. I'm going to move on but I'll maybe come back to you in a minute Mark. I want to ask you about onshore wind we didn't discuss this much in the first panel but I wanted to come back to you Morag in terms of asking you how you think the onshore wind target will be delivered are we looking at existing sites that have already perhaps been through planning or you know have been loitering in the planning system for some time we're looking at repowering is it a mixture of both? It's a blend so just for the understanding of the committee there's currently a discussion between the Scottish Government and industry for a sector deal on onshore wind based on the sixth carbon budget from the climate change committee Scotland will need an additional 12 gigawatts of wind for net zero so in terms of where did that come from we have already as an industry done supply chain and sorry not supply chain a project pipeline an analysis of where that comes from there are approximately 12 developers in scotland that will deliver those 12 gigawatts by projects that they have in process at the moment as you say it will be a blend what we particularly look at to optimise existing infrastructure is extension and repowering of wind farms so either add round the edge or repower what you've got because all the access tracks the grid connection the substations are all there already and that's the most efficient way the second thing that we look at is clustering so if you have three wind farms for example in a triangle it makes sense to fill in that area in the middle and again that's the most efficient use of land and connection and access and so on then once you've done that then you start to look at greenfield sites and we are not getting to 12 gigawatts of additional onshore wind in scotland without greenfield sites we will need them the ideal place to put them is closer to centres of population because again that minimises your grid cost but with the est al mure seismic array outside of locker b blocking about 10 percent of scotland across the central belt a resolution needs to be found for that to enable to unlock development in that area and that could change our ability to deploy from around about two gigawatts in that area to the moment up to eight gigawatts so that would be half of what we need to do so those would be really important okay so that's still a significant blockage um can i ask about the electricity network as well so we had discussion first panel about beauty denny um and other other transmission lines well how kind of prepared are we to take 20 gigawatts of onshore wind can i go back to aileen and scott then i'll bring in mark yeah i'm happy to pick it up first so i think we're prepared we have the technologies so we've been working over the last couple of years on something called the holistic network design there's an abundance of acronyms in our industry as you know but at least the blueprint to take is to 2030 and effectively what that will allow us to do is to increase more than double the export capacity that we have from scotland at the moment to put that in context scotland can export 6.6 gigawatts of renewables in any given day from scotland via onshore interconnectors and also the western hv dc link we have in flight and aileen and i are working on two further east coast dc links in the moment and there's potentially a further fourth within that sort of 2030 horizon that gets us to round about the 15 gigawatts of export capacity that will support the 25 gigawatts of additional renewables that are coming on to the system so can we engine so they're offshore and they help we're also looking at wherever possible where we can re-conductor so we can put um higher capacity conductors in existing towers we're also looking at high temp low sag which is an innovation in terms of conductors that allow them to get up to 30 more capacity out of the network the dc links are not not un impactful with respect to planning and consenting but they're obviously completely different from from overhead lines but by the time that we get into the 2030s and we're heading towards that 2040 target of up to 60 gigawatts of renewables from scotland we're back on to looking at further onshore upgrades as well as significant offshore upgrades we know how to engineer these the two biggest challenges that we have in delivering the infrastructure we'll be planning and consenting and the supply chains okay let me bring in mark at this point then we'll go back to to aileen hi thank you man um basically i think um the the the the good experts are in the room rather than here especially of the transmission scale i think from our experiences but a bit a bit more distribution level and though i welcome the identification by scotland renewables that they can get the 12 gig with 12 large sites i'm quite nervous that we're missing an immediate opportunity of the gap filling i agree with scot there's some of the biggest challenges acceptability and planning um for these things and we've got an opportunity um with that with more local what locally and community owned um sites at a smaller scale to actually fill a lot of the gaps quicker i mean i'm delighted i'm delighted but they offer with the offshore wind developments i mean and even the news of coryglass today on the macro scale and the longer scale but i think as as the driving imperative to decarbonise quicker as well and to do it up front is to try and fill in the gaps and take advantage of as they repower in the smaller sites expanding and taking advantage of that and the green the greenfield sites there's a lot of gap filling we can do and make make better use of the distribution grid um embedded generation for that point of view and that's particularly an area and i think to some degree i see the battle the battle to a wider wider argument of decarbonisation and a sort of just an inclusive way will be won at that level and both from the point of view the absolute generation we achieve but also getting the ownership and and almost um you know people taking responsibility for then the network systems and we were seeing the benefit of that when but where it's closer to home and closer to the end user yeah thanks very much um aileen yeah so you asked about network readiness and the title of this inquiry is about inhibitor and enabler and i think as we sit here today um the grid is an inhibitor and we heard that in the session this morning and why is it an inhibitor it's because we don't have enough um and i'm sure we can explore that further um as the discussion goes on but it's key also that it's an enabler and scott described very well the plans that are in place but we also recognise that there's some critical critical steps in order to be able to implement this in the near term and i've got a list of three who doesn't love a list of three um and the first one is around about planning um and this isn't about you know throwing away all the good things that happen in planning it's around about um putting in place a more structured process with clear timelines and clear roles and voices for all involved in particular the communities and you know Billy Denny has been mentioned we've learned a lot in the last dozen years since then and we particularly learned about the importance of engaging early with the affected communities and understanding those impacts that's not to say there won't be bumps on the road i'm sure there will be subsequent inquiries we will talk about this this further and but it is a critical aspect the second one is about commitment um so commitment is key so commitment to deliver this infrastructure commitment to the decarbonisation not changing the rules not changing the direction of travel not changing the pace why do we need that because we're operating in a global environment where we're trying to attract in technologies skills supply chain has been mentioned a number of times we just talked this morning about things like investment in ports infrastructure if we get the commitment right then i think we can bring in inward investment and actually drive the economy of our country and the third one is around about skills um there's a huge opportunity that you know the draft strategy came with a just transition element to it um you know we want to to effectively transition from a high carbon economy to a low carbon economy and doing this in a managed way requires that real planning around about skills development across the whole of our country so that our young people today can see a future can see a high value job where they can actually contribute to the social good and the social fabric of our country so those are my three things planning commitment and skills okay say them again that's great well i'm sure we'll keep coming back to those themes okay i'm going to go to the deputy community has got a supplementary on this before i go to the next person who'll be Jackie Dunbar so if you're in it i just want to ask and so we have it on the record as you said that currently the grid is an inhibitor could you maybe just explain why that is and what would address that so i think all of the the panel members this morning and more i could maybe touch on this as well talked about the challenges of getting connected and you know connection dates now extending you know a decade into the to the mid 2030s now now why is that it's because there is insufficient grid capacity and it was mentioned this morning as well the level of constraints and i think that the figure that was used by the national audit office earlier this month was up to 62 million pounds a day and that is a consequence of not having enough grid capacity that the power that's being generated is effectively not able to access the market and flow forward on to homes and consumers that's the situation that has built up over a number of years there has been in many people's minds good reason for that because of the uncertainty about the future and spending money that potentially was not going to be required but the consequence as we see today is that that shortage is actually costing homes and businesses consumers but also the decarbonisation of our economy a lot yeah i can certainly come in on that one i think what's probably helpful to the committee is to look at the underlying reason of why we are in the pickle that we are in and it's because in the past we have always had a responsive grid development you had to bring forward a clear needs case demonstrate that more grid was needed and then you were allowed to build it by the regulator the reason being that grid is eye-watering really expensive that cost gets added to consumers bills so you never want to build more than you need net zero has entirely changed the game at no point in the past have we ever had an end point for what we needed our electricity system to do and now net zero creates that end point and what we're trying to do is we're trying to plan a grid through a regulation system and the regulation is there to control not to forward plan and develop and be proactive and this is why we find ourselves in this situation that the future systems operator has been brought forward as a proposal to remedy this because it would be an entity that plans where we need to go but as we've said we're not expecting to see that for quite some years yet it's bogged down in the energy security bill in the UK parliament before we can get the legislation to create it off-gem are again trying to do some processes around there's a process called asti and I will defer to my colleagues to talk about that which is about that anticipatory investment in infrastructure but again you're asking your regulator who is there to control to then start doing proactive and it's really not what they were ever set up to do and this is why we find ourselves in this pickle so looking at the report that came out from the ccc last week which asked the question can we have a stable secure affordable net zero grid by 2035 absolutely yes we can but not at the pace of change that is happening right now all the things that we need to happen to make that of reality are all happening too slowly. Scott do you want to add to that I'll pass back the screen. Yes I guess I might be stealing a wee bit from Noam Chomsky here and kind of look at the optimism over despair so I wouldn't categorise grid as the inhibitor what I'd say was was the catalyst it's mutually consistent with renewables ambitions but where I absolutely agree with Morag and Alien is that we have came out a decade or more of a regulator resisting anticipatory investment ahead of need they have moved significantly we can see that signal through the asti over that last year even if we just go back a couple of years we were still struggling with the regulator in terms of that building ahead of need that has moved significantly I think that if you know if we can crack the planning consenting part of the equation and we can also address some of the major challenges that we've got in supply chain and also capitalise on that in the way that alien characterised that it does have economic benefit we see significant interest within our company within our company for DC cable manufacturers now we need five major DC cables hundreds of kilometres of cable to be produced and there's not enough capacity in the world and those manufacturers want to come to Scotland so I think there is a unique opportunity through this transition I think there's a there's a really good metaphor that we I think that we use is that is that at the moment we are in a climate change emergency we need to treat it as such if we look at the height of Covid when we saw what we could do with the vaccine in 10 months we were able to create and produce a vaccine whereas normally it would take 10 to 12 years that's the kind of tectonic change that we need in terms of planning consenting and supply chain issues to crack this but if we can get that level of support then I genuinely think that we can realise Scotland's ambitions here so I'm getting known in Chomsky on the official report of the Scottish Parliament community now okay and I'm briefly going to bring in Liam now on a planet on the planning side just on exactly that issue so Scott Aileen you've both talked about planning as an issue now we've just had NPF four I think Scottish renewables were broadly welcoming of the new framework but Scott first then does NPF four deliver on the planning that you need and that you've just referred to as a challenge so it takes us forward but it doesn't go far enough you know I think that we need a planning process that has defined timescales so if I can quote so beauty denny is one project we have a live project in south west scotland at the moment and KTR can do in tongland it has been eight years in the making frustrated through a planning process for four or five years there was three years of redesign and changes to accommodate what stakeholders wanted within that area as well that cannot happen if we're going to build these dc links as I look ahead to eagle one the first that needs to be up and commissioned and operating to export capacity by 20 27 so just four years from now I need a planning consent obtained by 2024 first of second quarter this is not a problem that's unique to scotland so I don't want to characterise it's been about npa four or that it's the same you know there's no point in building a dc link that has one consent in scotland doesn't have a consent in england and Wales we have the same problem there's a dco process with defined timescales but typically those could be up to four years as well so actually what we need is a fairly big systemic change in the way that we approach this and that's why I take you back to the metaphor I used earlier as if we genuinely believe that we have a climate emergency here it requires us to authorise and consent this infrastructure in a different way there is a proposal to bring forward a central networks plan across GBA as a whole which scotland's infrastructure would also be accommodated in and I guess one of the things that we can think about we begin to think about is what role could that actually play in setting out the benefits including enhanced community benefits that this infrastructure can deliver against scotland's scotland's targets and how could that play out your bigger role in speeding up the consenting process Aileen anything to add to that? Yeah I obviously agree with that and I mean planning is difficult at the end of the day there are a lot of complex factors that need to be traded off in undertaking a planning process and whatever it is that we do here we shouldn't step away from that and we shouldn't step away from making sure that there's a robust evidential underpinning and that all voices are heard and some of the things that scott talked about particularly around about things on community benefits on the grid side can help with some of the transfer of costs and benefits that are associated with that I would also highlight that there's been significant progress certainly in the grid sector, the development of our understanding of biodiversity, biodiversity net gain, natural capital types of approaches, our chalk and cheese compared with where we were a dozen years ago and similarly the involvement in the communities and the example scot gave there I could similarly give you examples in the north of Scotland around about changing designs in order to meet community concerns but the scale of that is absolutely profound and it may have been a bit, I think that Stuart Hazeldine mentioned earlier, for Bule Denny's, that is what we are talking about in the north of Scotland, we are talking about major infrastructure build to the north of Bule to the east of Bule down the east coast in addition to the sub-sea links down to England across the Murray Firth and most welcome out to the western Isles with all the benefits that hopefully that will bring to that local community. It is absolutely astonishing and we talk a lot about it being equivalent to what happened in the 50s and 60s. I actually think that it's even bigger than that, the scale of the change so does our current planning system fit that? It's hard to answer that with a yes but it's also very, very important that we don't diminish all the good things that happen through planning just now in a rush to reform and a rush to move forward. Thank you. It's a lot of questions from Jackie. I'm going to ask Mark a question if you don't mind but if any of the other panels would like to come in and add to it then please feel free. Mark, as you're probably aware the committee as part of their away days visited the Aberdeen-Donside hydro project which isn't in my constituency and we saw the fantastic work that goes on there. Can I ask you what role does local community projects like that have in supplying the current electricity network and how can we harness their potential moving forward? Thank you Jackie. No, it's very relevant indeed and I think when we're listening to others there and I mean actually after trying to think about it from the point of view of infrastructure I've been spending quite a lot of a couple of decades working with communities who are off-grid and the challenges and practicalities of that. I'm also a huge fan of the grid. I think at the transmission level it's been really, really good and we're well ahead of the curve on that. I think also spending the last 15 years wrestling with the distribution grid that itself has created a lot more challenges for us for actually delivering which is a real shame because I think generally if we're going to achieve this and achieve this quick enough as touching on earlier we need to be looking at the distribution and the local supply. The opportunity of having local ownership and community ownership it was almost touching into the last point about planning to some degree beauties in the eye of the beholder and genuinely you see the difference if someone is invested and someone has some involvement in a project you take the Donside 1 you can think of many others you have a very, very different view and it's nice to heart back so when the hydro first rolled out in the 60s from that point of view people's idea about it was welcomed. I think if we're going to succeed and take people along with us as we have to get them it's not giving out freebies it's getting people feeling they have some ownership and some stake in it and by doing that they welcome it it's something that happens. I mean it's two examples are mind when you're up in Ocney for the point of view that we have a turbine up on the hill people look up to it and say it's our turbine and they smile when they see it and that's a completely different opposite. It sounds twee but it really does matter if we're going to take people with us rapidly and do make this change and acceptability never mind the wider benefit but things like that. The other even twee example is the Isle of the Sharpensea where the old matriarch of the village actually chopped down on her hedge. Originally she was very much against the wind turbine going up in that area just a one megawatt turbine but when her granddaughter told her that every time we went round it was 7p for the community she got her nephew to chop down the hedge so she could see it turning. It's a human example but it's a real example of if we have local involvement in these infrastructure changes we'll actually be able to let them happen because we're working together with it and people taking it and staking it rather than something that's done to them and at best the object and grumble. It's simplistic terms but I think that that would be absolutely key but over and above that I think the thing I've seen most over the last two decades at local energy and community energy is the indirect and second generation benefit you get from getting people involved in generation if they get involved in generation then they think about other infrastructure projects whether that's communications, mobility, all the things we've ridd, the harder things sometimes we're going to have to tackle in decarbonising. I think when we're talking about the emphasis on grid but early on a lot was talking about hydrogen and chemical fuels and stores and things like that I still feel they have to be the last resort. I think in first resort we reduce and we have energy efficiency in second resort we make better connections so we can balance the grid more easily. I'm losing my train a bit here but I think the opportunity that when people take on projects like the education or local balancing and they take an interest in local demand but to enable that we have to restructure the infrastructure not in a physical sense and one of my colleagues was referring to more the question of contracting and things like that for local actors, for smaller actors to be involved is de-risking. I don't want to go on too long but we talked about the western Isles interconnector was a really good example there where you have basically a very large interconnector being put in there. The local population wanted to buy a bit of it, wanted to create an opportunity to have local generation but at the early stages of that they were prevented because the actual requirements to underwrite and things like that were too high to the local communities, the local organisation, even the local authority couldn't move quick enough and were going to be left in the western Isles with 140 megawatts that will probably get snapped up by some one or two large operators because they're ready to move and it's actually making sure the system, the contracting, actually de-risks and allows smaller actors with less deep pockets to be able to interact with the process. I'll stop with that. Thank you, that was really interesting. I'm just going to have one more question because I'm conscious of time. I'm going to come to Murang. I asked Stuart earlier how critical is it for the Scottish electricity decarbonisation further to be a Scottish CCC cluster. Can I have your views on that? I will divide your question into two if I may. CCS and electricity, I will separate them out. In terms of the electricity supply in Scotland, approximately 798 depending on the weather and demand of Scotland's electricity needs is currently met from renewables. Scotland is more than capable of meeting its own electricity needs from renewable energy. Likewise, as we decarbonise transport, which is 25 per cent of our energy use and heat, which is around 50 per cent of our energy use, we can have sufficient renewable energy generation to meet that need. In terms of can we achieve net zero without CCUS, then I would defer to much greater experts on them myself such as Stuart and such as the CCC. All the credible advice that I have read on that is no, we will need carbon capture and storage. There will be parts of our economy that we cannot decarbonise using electricity and there will be parts of our economy where we will need to do those compensatory measures that Stuart talked about. That is the role that CCUS will play. Yes, we will need it, but not necessarily in the electricity generation sphere but certainly in other spheres. Stuart, do you like anything to add? I guess that what I would say is that, as Morag has pointed out, about 98 per cent of our supply is from renewables. However, there is a plant at the SSEO in Peterhead that does help to make sure that we can balance out the system. I think that the way that I would look at this is that there is a transition as we are building out the transmission network, which also enables marks community schemes as well. If I look at SP distribution, if you can just pick up a comment on that, about 78 per cent of our grid supply points, the other interface between distribution and transmission, are effectively exporting or constrained at any point in time. When we are building the bigger superhighway, it is also allowing greater ambition to be realised at the community levels as well. I think that that is increasingly important from a resilience perspective within those communities as well as the economics of it. In terms of the question, if you look at the winter that we have just came through, there have been points where gas has provided up to 40 per cent of the demand. That is a stark reality. If you are going to have a period where you are going to rely on that, given that we do believe that it is a climate emergency, you cannot have that polluting the world's atmosphere, so you need carbon capture alongside it as well. I am very, again, optimistic to use that term. There is a lot of work happening in a university just along the road from here at Heria-Watt. I would like to see more effort in Scotland looking at the industrial clusters for hydrogen and for carbon capture as part of that, to make sure that it is within the armory. Beyond that, I do not—this is not my area of expertise. Thank you very much, Jackie. The next question is going to come from the Deputy convener, Fiona Slop. I would like to direct those questions to Scotland Alien. Do the current business plans in relation to transmission and distribution from SSEN and spend allow for sufficient investment in the networks to realise what is in the draft energy strategy from the Scottish Government that will come to you for Scotland and to Alien? Our business plans spend around between now and 2030, or the early 2030s, approximately £14 billion, about £6 billion of that on our distribution networks and about £8 billion of that on the transmission networks. I do not know where Alien's numbers will be terribly dissimilar. One of the things that I want to say as well is that the model that we have is highly important here. It spreads out the cost of that infrastructure over a 45-year period. The returns are relatively low. The regulator has pushed those down further at the price control reviews, but we believe that they can still attract the necessary inward investment that we need into Scotland. What that ultimately means is that, for the use of the transmission and distribution networks, customers can expect to continue to pay about 40 pence per day going forward. I think that we have the quantum of investment there. We also have a number of uncertainty mechanisms in place from the regulator. One of the things that they woke up to was that they needed to make the price controls much more agile to allow us a sureer ambition accelerate to be able to trigger that money. One of the challenges that I would put to the regulator is that they are equipped to process some of those uncertainty mechanisms agilely and quickly in return. We need to see that over the next 12 to 18-month period. We need to see the evidence of their ability to support our ambition alongside it. It is also important that I say a word or two about what that funding provides. The low-carbon transition is not simply about the very high-profile headline transmission network. It is also about ensuring that domestic customers can realise their ambition with respect to electrification of vehicles or a transition into, for example, electrification of heat. One of the things that we have to do is make sure that we address the safety of the electricity network directly within customers' premises. We have significant funding within the distribution price controls to make sure that we are upgrading the very low-voltage tributaries that serve the end-of-customer, alongside building the transmission network out as well. The second of the three points on my list earlier was about commitment. I think that that is part of the questions about the regulatory framework going forward. We saw the change that happened early last year with the shift in looking at the UK level, the national strategy that unlocked the big investments that we are now seeing on the transmission system and saw a shift in the regulatory framework. It is very easy to do that when that spotlight is shining and that shift is happening. However, we need to maintain that over the course of the next 10 and 15 years. We are looking forward to the targets at 2030, of which Scotland is an absolutely critical part of that, and I refer again to the huge economic benefits that I can bring to the north of Scotland in particular. Beyond that, we are looking to decarbonise our electricity system by 2035. That is a long and sustained effort, and that commitment is absolutely key. We have seen a change in the regulator. It has a job to do, more aggravated earlier, around about control. That is very important. It is acting on behalf of the consumer and making sure that the right decisions are being made. Those decisions need to be made in an agile way. They also need to take into account the cost of inaction, which is what we see predominantly through constraints today, for example, around deferrals and uncertainty, if you like, around about the future. Commitment for the long term is a focus on targets. I will not talk about targets just now, because I will spend an extra five minutes talking about that, but we are really all striving towards that same common goal, whether that is in the building at Westminster, the regulator or those of us who are the key stakeholders in delivery of all that. We all need to be working together towards achieving it. If any of us start to wobble, wobble and flake out, that sends a signal to all the parties that are involved and probably encourages everybody to take a step back. What is the impact of current delays, deferrals and any current inflationary impacts on your business plans? At the moment, we are spending in line. Both companies have spent in line with their overall allowances. That is a pretty remarkable achievement when you look at competitors south of the border as well. We have seen inflation go up and down, so I know that inflation has been upwards over the past year, but it is not all that long ago, 2015-2016. Inflation was actually negative as well. It swings around about and evens up going forward. I think that probably what my acute concern is going forward is to realise this ambition. I come back to the theme about the regulator. I have heard Jonathan Brearley publicly say that they have done their bit with ASDA last year and that the aliens point is very important. We need to ensure that they continue to do that going forward. However, if we do not get those consents in the time that we need and we need support in terms of global manufacturing, the UK-Scotland is not the only area that is outbuilding major transmission infrastructure in Holland and Germany at the moment. They are doing the same and they are placing contracts out to 2037. Our regulatory framework does not support that so much at the moment, but we need those planning and consents and we need more resources in the UK to continue to spend in line with the projections that we have made. We can address those issues often when we see them in the very conscious that a number of those issues are reserved areas. I am going to focus now on the Scottish Government and maybe come to you, Mark, if that is okay, and ask what more could the Scottish Government be doing to support network investment and readiness? Oh, crumbs. I will ask the same question to Morag after as well, so I will give you a bit of time there, Mark. I was giving Mark a bit of time to think there. I was not sure if you were... I am confused. It is Mark. Mark, do you want to answer that question? Right, so no time to think, Mark. No, with no time to think. I think the opportunity, as I said, so much of it is of which makes it quite tricky from that point of view and lying with Ofgem, but making a needs case and supporting, especially at the lower voltage level and the user level, that we have a decarbonisation plan for things like domestic heat, things like mobility and all the rest, that makes that case, that makes that argument for saying, we need to rapidly, especially at the distribution level, we need to rapidly reorganise this and do it, because it is not just about wires and cables, it is about the challenges that people like spend and the SSCN are going to face when there is a huge amount of heat pumps. I really, really want and welcome the idea of electrification of most of our heat and our mobility where we can, because that is by far the second best, the second resort, with lack of energy efficiency still being the first resort, but I think the challenge we are going to face with dealing with people on networks, I mean, spend very kindly applied to Ofgem just this last year to get further provisions where we can use local trusted partners and community anchor organisations to actually help roll out things like heat pumps and the challenges we are going to have as people start to use the new technology and all the rest and get people to adopt them and use them out efficiently in the community. So those sort of things are all helping the interaction with the UK where Scottish Government are both helping their individuals, their citizens to decarbonise and have affordable and good lives at the same time making the national case would be one I could think of Thank you. Is that stimulating demand side of it? I think that the Scottish Government have got a role, is that what you are saying? Yes, and I think, I mean, from that point of view, I mean, yes, it's mostly about demand and making that case that at the, yeah, I'll stick with that. Thanks Mark, and more, what's your ask of the Scottish Government to support network investment and readiness? One thing that my network colleagues work will be based on is we have the future energy scenarios and similar systems, which is how the needs case is put forward for what's going to be needed in the future. I'm picking up on what Emily said earlier from Silver Energy Scotland, that setting of targets, so there's a clear signal of what is going to be done that feeds into those future energy scenarios, then allows my colleagues to put forward a case around that to Ofgem, so that is very helpful. Planning has come up at various points during the system, and I've said it in this Parliament before, and I will say it again, the MPF forward is probably the best planning regime for renewables in the whole of Europe, it is to be commended, but it alone does not do the entire job. One of the key issues is there is no set format for how you put in a planning application either for renewable energy development or for your grid infrastructure investment. What tends to happen is that the lawyers will be cautious as lawyers are and say, put in everything, because the decision makers have no clear framework of what to ask for, they will get nervous and they will ask for more just to make sure that they've covered everything. What we end up with is bigger and bigger and bigger piles of paper that then puts a huge strain on the whole of the system to try and deal with, and the fact that each application turns up looking entirely different from the one that went before means that you can't particularly build up expertise in where you look in this great big pile of paper for what you need to know. We are in discussion with the Scottish Government at the moment to have a standardised format. We've been doing this stuff for 20 years, we have been doing grid infrastructure for longer than that. We should be clear on what it is that decision makers need to know to be able to make an effective decision, and we could do a lot of streamlining in that way of cutting down those huge timelines. Again, that's a key thing that the Scottish Government can look at doing. Eileen and Scotland agree with that very briefly. I do, and resources are critical in that. There's a lot of people involved amongst a number of different authorities in the planning process and making sure that that is adequately resourced. In particular, you don't get that asymmetry of resource where maybe the applicant has got more resources and it overwhelms the parties that have to deal with that. Scott, do you want to say something very briefly, or just say you agree? I do get a good planning of good of labour again, but the other piece, Eileen, and I can miss it, is that we have an opportunity for massive growth in the workforce right across the supply chain. That requires support and effort from the Scottish Government into local colleges for the work and the low voltage for new apprentices, all the way up to senior engineering roles. We have high quality jobs at every level, also jobs that you wouldn't necessarily think about, and these stuffy conventional networks, businesses, data scientists, customer service professionals, and financing commercial, of course, as well. There's a real potential for us here. I'd just like to clarify something from earlier on. I'll put this again to Scott and Eileen after. You talked about regulatory frameworks. My understanding is that Ofgem will set price controls, which regulates how much Scottish Power and SSE can spend on investment and innovation during a particular period. I understand that both transmission and distribution are regulated until 2028, or they're in these regulated periods until 2028. Scott First, what scope is there to alter your investment plans in response to changing circumstances, changing technologies, changing priorities during those regulated periods? We're now in the second year of our current transmission review, and there are two categories of expenditure that the regulator gives us, a baseline expenditure based on realistic forecasts that we put forward. Some of that will be replacement and modernisation of an aging asset base. A lot of that was built between the 60s and 90s, and it also needs to be replenished modernised, brought up to modern standards, as well as the increased capacity to meet the load growth that we're talking about at the moment. However, there are also significant uncertainty mechanisms that allow us to respond and apply to the regulator for further funding. For schemes that are greater than £100 million, there is now the new ASTI framework. It was previously the large onshore transmission incentive mechanism, Lottie. As I said, there's an abundance of acronyms. Anything over £100 million, we had to submit the needs case. It was a fairly laborious initial needs case, final needs case, and ASTI changed the nature of that to make it much more agile on the part of the regulator. They will focus on support from the companies, the TOs and the plans that we submit endorsed by the electricity system operator, and then work with us during the project assessment as we go to tender the contract to give us that award to make sure that we're still efficient and we're doing all the right things. Below the £100 million, there are medium-sized mechanisms that we can access as well. There are probably a significant number of projects. At the moment, in January, I submitted 12 reopeners for MSIP projects to the regulator for them to process. That was the point that I was making earlier. If our colleagues up at Scottish Hydroelectricity Transmission are doing the same, National Grid are doing the same down south, is the regulator equipped to actually process those quickly enough to give us a decision and let us get the investment out of the door? Again, the regulator maintains—there is no sector, I think, because it's heavily scrutinised by a regulator. In our transmission business, every July, we submit one and a half million data points down to the lowest level of materiality. We publish our accounts in detail and the returns that we make to make sure that everything that we're doing when we're applying for those reopeners. Ultimately, the bill comes back to the level that the regulator was expecting it to for the consumer. Very grateful. Eileen, would you like to add to that, or is it similar situation? It is the same, and the quantum of work that we're putting on the desk of the regulator is equally as large. I think that we planned within this current five-year period to put forward 46 separate requests for funding from right the way down to transmission that is always really big numbers, but a couple of million pounds up to a couple of billion pounds is the scale of what you're looking at. The additional point is that you referred to things changing as you go along. There is a lot of change happening in our industry, in our economy or society. You name it within those fixed periods. One of the things that we see when we engage with our stakeholders and our communities is that they're particularly looking for us to take into account environmental community and other impacts. When we're preparing investment decisions, I think that's right and appropriate, often as an economic regulator, they've tended to underweight those broader considerations and particularly tend to underweight the benefits of the economic development that can flow to a community and to an economy as a consequence, a indirect benefit, if you like. Certainly, one of the things that we'll be looking for going forward and the questions around about off-gems duties is to take into account broader factors than just those pure economic considerations when making investment decisions, but not doing it more slowly as a consequence. I understand, very grateful. Thank you very much, Liam. Monica, you've got some questions. I'm going to cheekily say to you that till just after 12, and then I went to interrupt you and then I will interrupt you. That's okay. I mean, I think a lot of it has actually been addressed in the answers so far, because I did want to focus on community energy. I thought that Mark has frozen, but I saw some movement there. We know that the Scottish Government aims to more than double community-owned energy and locally-owned energy to 2 gigawatts by 2030. You've already said what some of the key challenges are and talked about the current electricity network, so I just wanted to come back to you. Is there anything else you want to add about the key challenges and what way the sector is inhibited by the current electricity network? I was going to just ask a question. I might just aim that you as well, Mark, around shared ownership, because the Government wants to encourage shared ownership models. Is that enough to encourage or there needs to be a more formal mechanism to implement that? Okay. The first element of it is a lot of what I was saying earlier. I think that when we had the feeding tariff in play 10 to 15 years ago, we were very much just hitting up on the challenges of infrastructure, but as that fell off and there's been a lull on that side, there's been less of a challenge. However, as we now have a situation where, almost sadly, the wholesale price is going up again, these projects are starting to look economically viable again on a smaller scale, and we're going to face exactly the same infrastructure issues that we were facing a decade ago. I do see a real important role in the two-gig target when the Scottish Government is really welcomed. With good community taking on responsibility, we could quite easily double that. I would feel that there's an opportunity and ambition and sights that would let us actually double that, but we will hit the great issues. A lot of it is the way to set up the securities, the liabilities that let smaller players get part of the larger infrastructure reinforcements to be able to get a seat at the table and to be able to have a stake in it for a while. Quite often, we'll express interest and we'll fall off as the price becomes too high, as the price becomes too high to continue to be part of those reinforcement strategies. I think that there is an element of de-risking. The Scottish Government did that well previously with the early stages of the CARES project and things like that, where they were able to provide support at risk early on, pre-permitting, that was then either paid back or become part of the socialised benefit once the projects are built out. I think that's a big chunk of it. I think that just encouraging shared ownership is well and good and shared ownership is welcomed. I think that with re-packing and being sure with what we have offshore, we wouldn't want to turn down the opportunity of shared ownership, because I think community benefit is only the benefit you get from a proportionate involvement, where the community actually takes responsibility and gets reward for that. That whole ownership, proportional shared ownership, owning the funds and making use of the funds, is key, but we can't just encourage it. I think that with the experience of the last two decades, you have that risk of the sort of classic golden window boxes that where people just don't know what to do with the money. I think an important part, we had the opportunity with the forestry estate about a decade ago and there was work even done by a predecessor, Fergus Ewing, looking at how we can have better shared ownership opportunities. A key thing is just enabling an organisation to be able to enter into discussions. You're taking basically non-technical people into a technical world. Am I not coming through? I'm taking non-technical people. I'm talking to you. No, that's okay. That's a final question. You might not know a lot about it, but we've heard previously from North Ayrshire Council that they take a community wealth building approach and we've heard about their work on solar. The Scottish Government has committed to bringing forward a community wealth building bill. Do you see that having an enabling role or are there any opportunities within that for community energy and local energy? I think absolutely. North Ayrshire is probably a very good example for the point of view that even now they've set aside that fund of about £300,000 when they're looking to see how they can best use the point of view of enabling communities and we've been in discussion with them. That's exactly what I talk about. It's not just encouraging. You have to enable. It's setting people on the tracks so that they can take advantage of the situation and that's communities of small or even quite large scale. Is that active and positive enablement more than just encouragement? That's great. Thank you. The deputy convener's got one follow-up question and I have a question at the end. This is a very short inquiry and it's a massive area, but it's a chance to put the spotlight on our electricity infrastructure. Is there anything that you wanted to tell us today that you haven't had the opportunity to? Can I ask more, please? Yes, I can start with that. It's been touched on that Ofgem has an ambiguous relationship to the achievement of net zero. It is not in their primary legislation and how that plays out. It was in the UK Government's energy white paper that the strategy and policy statement was due to be consulted on in 2021 and we've never seen hide nor hear. That is the mechanism by which the UK Government can indicate to Ofgem the policies and strategies that they need them to pay attention to. That is a mechanism by which you can get them involved in net zero without having to go back through Parliament to amend primary legislation. We would very much like to see that come forward. Any discussions that the Scottish Government is having with the UK Government around their achievement of net zero, it would be very helpful to raise that. I'm just going to limit you all because it could be an endless list. If you could each give one term, that would be brilliant. You'd be pleased to have only had one. It's in relation to the setting of targets, which has been touched on a number of times today and about the importance of targets being set in a joined-up way. You can set targets for technology in isolation or for the number of jobs or for economic benefit or environmental impacts, and they can end up contradicting each other. When targets are set, I think that there's an important step around about going, will they actually all mutually compatible? From that perspective, and more I've talked about this earlier, when we're looking to do planning, having targets that are coherent, if you like, as a whole gives a lot more confidence in that planning process, which then feeds through into the development, to the planning consent, the delivery and thereon. Is it okay, Scott? Very briefly? I think that that's the key theme here. I have often wondered how the regulator is compelled to adopt the targets that the climate change committee or the Scottish Government will struggle with, and that feeds into an earlier theme that both my colleagues made as well with respect. How is that encapsulated in their valuation framework when they come to make their decisions? If we can get that linkage formalised to a greater extent, I think that it can help with the regulatory decision-making process. I think that we're coming back on the recognition of the power and value of local content and community ownership. I think that we've heard it from a planning regime point of view, but even in hard grid infrastructure sense, I think that there's a lot of emphasis on the macro scale, but the opportunity where over half our power will need to be balanced at a local level and the opportunity to make sure that we're enabling that and doing that at low voltage and distribution. To do that, we need to make a new system that's infrastructure-smart, but also enable people to interact with that market. Okay, thank you very much. I'm going to ask my one question at the end. One of the books that I read when I was younger and I still look at is a great book, Part from the Glens, which talks about Scotland's transition to using renewable energy in the form of hydra pump storage and all the rest of things, massive dam building. As a result of that, we transferred power to the areas that needed along what were then superhighways. Scotland's countryside had been shaped by the superhighways that were put in the 50s, the 132 kV lines. Do you think that, well, they were obviously built there for a reason because they were probably the best route and the most protected route? You've talked about planning, Aileen and Scott, and about the difficulties of it. Because those lines are already there, one way to avoid problems would be planning, would be to make sure that those lines are upgraded and form the basis of the superhighway in the future without moving them. Is that not a simple answer, Scott? I think that, well, hopefully, I picked up at the start that is an avenue that we will seek to exhaust all opportunities to upgrade existing infrastructure, particularly for my business in the central belt of Scotland. We look to do that. I highlighted earlier, for example, that we've got an export capacity from Scotland of 6.6 gigawatts. Over 2 gigawatts of that was delivered through not building any overhead line but through innovations like series compensation, reducing the reactants and overhead lines, and upgrading of some of the power croat corridors. Again, the Pareto optimality rule can only take you so far before you get into building infrastructure, but those corridors will probably remain the most appropriate given the geology and location of them. Sir Aileen, you will appreciate that from the beauty to Denny line, which went from 132 kV to 400 kV almost along exactly the same route. It seems to be sensible. Once it had been agreed that it was along the same route, planning became easier, didn't it? Yes, in January 2010, I remember it very well. I look back on what happened in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and there is a lot for us to learn from that. I look particularly back at the Hydro Act and the commitment within it about bringing economic development to the north of Scotland and stopping depopulation after the war. I think that that runs through what we are trying to do here now. What you are saying is absolutely right. It is not the intention here to put up new lines and greenfield sites, much in the way that Morag described earlier in relation to the development of onshore wind. I will give you a couple of examples. You referred to beauty Denny, which was an upgrade to a 400 kV. At the moment, one side of that is still operating at 275 kV. Part of the network investment that we are making for 2030 will be to operate that to 400 kV, so there will not actually be overhead line investment in order to realise that greater capacity. Similarly, we are in the process of developing an overhead line reinforcement out to the sky, which will not only unlock decarbonisation but also significantly improve the security of supply on the island and out towards the western isles, and we are reusing the same route there as much as possible. We will be taking down the old line once we have built the new one. Wherever we can do that and whenever we can use new technologies, that is our first resort. You and I well know that I have been involved in the sky project for constituents over there, and the problems have been faced, but it seems that it is moving forward. Thank you very much for the evidence given this morning. It has been extremely interesting. I am going to briefly suspend the meeting for three or four minutes, let us say, to allow the witnesses to move so that we can go on to the final item in public. I will briefly suspend the meeting until 12.11. Welcome back to this meeting. We are going to move on to agenda item 3, which is the consideration of a type 1 consent notification sent by the Scottish Government relating to the proposed UK statutory instrument, the Reach Amendment Regulations 2023. This is a UK statutory instrument, and the UK Government is seeking the Scottish Government's consent to legislate in this area. The committee's role in relation to a type 1 notification is to decide whether it agrees with the Scottish Government's proposal to consent to the UK Government making regulations within devolved competence and in the manner that the UK Government has indicated to the Scottish Government. I am going to ask if there are any comments members would like to make. I will come to you first, Mark. Thank you very much, convener. As you noted, it is a type 1 notification, so it does represent a significant change in the regulations. I noted that the regulations effectively delay both the registration and the compliance deadlines for a number of years. In particular, for one category of chemicals, it delays compliance checks until 2035. That has raised some significant concerns, particularly at the Westminster Environmental Audit Committee during their scrutiny of the regulations. It is important that we hear from our Scottish minister in relation to this, particularly about whether it does or does not represent divergence from the existing EU-reach chemicals. I would also like to understand a bit more about what the alternative transitional model is that is evolving for the development of our chemicals regulation in the UK and how that has worked in relation to the common framework for chemicals and pesticides that our ministers are directly involved in with their counterparts across the UK. I feel that there are some questions for the minister, and it would be a great service to this committee if the minister could appear before us. I am very conscious of the type times here for this, but I also want to emphasise the importance of regulation of chemical substances and the importance of the chemical industry to Scotland. I think that the importance of this area is key. I think that it would be beneficial to hear from the minister and perhaps also write if we have time to the relevant regulatory bodies in Scotland to get their perspective on this. It looks as if this is an essential step, but it is worthy of drilling down to the extent that we can do in the time that we have. Thank you. Does anyone else have any comments? On that basis, what I am going to do is propose that we invite Mary McCallan to come to the meeting next week and give a short bit of evidence to explain the situation on this. I am also going to ask Sir Clarks to write on behalf of the committee, the regulatory authorities, to ask if there is any evidence that they would like to submit. That evidence might be difficult to gather in the timescale, but I will give them the deadline of Monday morning next week so that we have time to consider it before the meeting on Tuesday. I think that that is a logical way to deal with this so that we can fully understand it. If everyone has agreed with that, that is what I am going to progress to do. Okay, so we have agreed on that. Thank you very much. Now, we have one more item, do we not, Clarks, which is the consideration of gender isolation 4, which is a negative instrument. The water and sewage service is to dwellings collection of unmetered charges by local authorities Scotland order 2023. This instrument is laid under the negative procedure, which means that its provisions will come into force unless the Parliament agrees to annul them. No motions to annul have been made. Do any members have any comments on this? I have one question that I assume this is done each year. It would be useful to know if all the money that is levied is actually collected, and if there is a difference between the levy amount and what is actually passed to Scottish Water, I assume. We could write, if the committee were happy, just write for an information point to the minister to ask him for that information so that we can understand what that is. However, if there are no other comments, would the committee be happy to agree that it does not want to make any specific recommendations in relation to this instrument? If we are agreed on that, that means that this part of the meeting is concluded and we are now going to go into private session.