Draft Contracts for Difference (Sustainable Industry Rewards) Regulations 2024

Dave Doogan Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 General Committees

[Dave Doogan (Angus) (SNP)]

I will speak with some reasonable volume; there is nothing wrong with my voice—I had quite a quiet weekend.

In the interests of collegiate working across the Floor of the Committee, let me say that contracts for difference are a useful mechanism and have demonstrated themselves to be so. They have delivered a systemic and substantial shift in the way that electricity is generated across the market in Great Britain.

What is proposed today is contingent on the CfD regime; it is an improvement to the regime—or rather an attempt to improve it. Criterion A is welcome, and in that respect the UK Government are nodding to what the Scottish Government have known for some time: that we should give priority to applying multiplier effects from substantial multibillion-pound investments in electricity generation from renewables to the supply chain at base in GB.

However, that is where CfD has largely fallen over—there have been a few notable exceptions, but systemic investment in the supply chain rooted in GB has not happened as a consequence of CfD. That is not to take anything away from the generation capacity that has been created from CfD and or even the funding mechanisms, which, like most funding mechanisms, are imperfect to a certain extent. However, it does signal that there is a substantial problem that Governments—both Scottish and UK—are trying to address.

I am pleased and proud that the Scottish Government have sought to address the issue in a substantially different way in terms of ScotWind’s focus on the strike price in the auction round, whereby it has prioritised a commitment from manufacturers to invest in the supply chain, rather than seeking the lowest possible price in the auction. CfD, however, continues relentlessly to pursue the lowest possible price, and we saw the Government come unstuck in auction round 5 with that approach. The way the Government have recalibrated that approach for auction round 6 is welcome, and I very much hope that it generates as much new capacity as possible in that auction round.

However, let me move on to the bit that the SNP fundamentally disagrees with. Criterion B for the sustainable industry rewards scheme is:

“Investment in more sustainable means of production, anywhere in the world.”

The Minister literally used the terms “means of production” in her speech, and I am glad she did, because it removes any doubt that she knows exactly what she is talking about. I would respectfully suggest that investing in another jurisdiction’s means of production is not the best use of bill payers money in the GB energy market. I do not think that the Government would find a great deal of support from ordinary bill payers in GB for using their standing charges to fund investments in the means of production in a foreign jurisdiction.

I am also concerned that the quantum that the Minister has set out, which I think is in the region of £1 billion over three years, will have an extremely marginal effect on GB’s manufacturing base by the time that it has been shared—potentially; we do not know in what proportion —with manufacturers in foreign jurisdictions. I am sure that Siemens Gamesa, Vestas and Hitachi are delighted with the UK Government’s largesse and ambitions to invest in other jurisdictions, despite that being the responsibility of Governments in those jurisdictions. Manufacturers and potential manufacturers here will take a much more jaundiced view, as the SNP does, of such a misplaced ambition to invest in potentially any market across the world.

With that, I decline to support the measure. I emphasise to the Minister that if the basis of what we are discussing today was simply criterion A, I would be happy to nod the regulations through, because that is a cogent and reasonable ambition for manufacturing in GB and, in particular, Scotland. However, that is not the case, and the regulations are somewhat—fatally, actually—undone by the provisions in criterion B.