Enabling Community Energy

Angus Brendan MacNeil Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP) [V]]

It is a great pleasure, as others have said, to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) on securing this debate, and the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous), who has been diving into the detail of this, as we have observed over a period of time. I praise his impressive cross-party work, which is very good indeed. I thank the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Ben Lake) for his cross-party efforts in this area. The list of Members he read out showed that there is a broad feeling that this should happen. It is an idea whose time has come. It is a modern idea, and it needs to happen.

At the moment—I checked before the debate—the UK is using 35 GW of energy, 38% of which is gas. Being June, there is 18% solar and 6% wind; 8% comes from France and 7% comes from Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands. Surely, when only 250 MW of energy is being produced locally, with the potential of 3 GW, it is time to change. That 3 GW would eclipse the 0.5 GW of coal that is being used this afternoon, according to the energy app.

It is vital that we take this step and move forward. Ofgem, as we know, is a bureaucracy. There is no energy market really in the UK; it is a bureaucracy, and it needs fixing and tinkering with. That is why local energy is an idea whose time has come. In my constituency of Na h-Eileanan an Iar, it is presumed that energy is transmitted towards London, given Ofgem’s bureaucratic models, and then distributed back from somewhere such as London. There is a distortion of reality because of those presumptions.

Stòras Uibhist, a local energy provider in South Uist, has wind farms that generate about 7 MW, and it is quite easy to see in South Uist what is happening, because of the power station at Lochcarnan. In Lochcarnan, it is possible to see when energy is being imported and exported. When energy is being produced in Uist, it is being used in Uist in the main. Some of it is exported, but very little energy is imported, which is why we need to have some sort of change to reflect that. We cannot have the most expensive distribution and transmission charges, when the reality is that we are not transmitting or even receiving energy.

The Scottish Government are trying to do something—they say it will be in the next Parliament—about working with Scottish islands to demonstrate the idea of carbon neutrality within islands. It is possibly already there within Uist and other islands, but it works well in the demonstration at Lochcarnan power station. I hope that this moves forward in the way that has been suggested cross-party. As our islands are 40% closer to the Arctic circle than London is, we have very long days at the moment—17 hours and 46 minutes. Some people in London might be surprised that solar power can be used. The former First Minister Alex Salmond said we are sitting on the “Saudi Arabia of renewables”. Unfortunately with wind, that is particularly true when it comes to ferries and travel, but when it comes to energy, we have huge potential. It is something that we can use, so I would like to see the efforts coming forward.

I would like to see the UK Government accept the reality. They have power over this issue at the moment, and they really should listen to the cross-party voices—from the Conservatives, the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National party, Plaid Cymru and elsewhere—and make the change to enable the potentially huge increase. As I said, 35 GW of energy are being used this afternoon. Three of those gigawatts—10%—could be coming from local energy production, which would also be a stimulus economically for many local communities. With that I will stop, because I do not want to take too much time and I know there a lot of Members who want to come in.