Floating Offshore Wind Projects

Stephen Flynn Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) for bringing forward this incredibly important debate. I will start in a slightly unusual fashion, by referring to something that happened 10 years ago. In April 2012, there was a Scottish parliamentary inquiry into renewable energy. An Aberdeenshire hotelier put forward a submission, both in writing and in person. He said that offshore wind was unreliable and an expensive form of power. Much like many things that Donald Trump has said, that has been proven to be completely untrue. As we know, offshore wind is six to nine times cheaper than its gas equivalent, and it is very reliable. He was referring to the Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group, a joint venture with Vattenfall, which sits off the coast of Aberdeen. It has been providing clean, green, sustainable electricity—enough to power all the homes in Aberdeen—since it came onstream. I was fortunate to visit it recently with the team from Vattenfall.

Another wind farm that sits just off the coast of Aberdeenshire is the Kincardine development, which has been referred by both the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire and the hon. Member for East Lothian (Kenny MacAskill). I went to visit Kincardine just under two weeks ago with a couple of colleagues. The weather was very Scottish—put it that way. The waves were choppy, and it would be unfair of me to name my colleagues who were perhaps a bit sick, although of course we cannot name people in the Chamber or Westminster Hall, so I guess my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen North and my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber have nothing to worry about.

It was a fascinating visit to the world’s largest offshore windfarm, and it showed us what can be done. Scotland’s potential in this regard is absolutely enormous, as has already been mentioned. We have 25% of Europe’s offshore wind capacity. What does that mean in real terms? At the moment, Scotland has about 1 gigawatt of installed offshore floating wind. There are 7 more gigawatts in the pipeline, and 28 gigawatts are due to come onstream from the first ScotWind licensing round in the years to come.

People want to know what that means for them. In the first instance, we need that to mean jobs and opportunities. That is particularly true for my constituency, given the sheer volume of individuals who work in the pre-existing oil and gas sector. We need to see a just, managed, fair transition that protects their employment and allows them to have new jobs in the future. I firmly believe that can be achieved. It is about not just jobs and opportunities, but energy security. It is about not just ensuring energy security for Scotland, because we are going to have far too much electricity to meet our own needs, but ensuring energy security for our friends and allies elsewhere on these isles and right across the European continent.

It is not just about energy security either, but about what we could achieve. Scotland could become not just an offshore wind delivery hub for these islands or Europe, but a global renewable offshore wind hub. Again, I firmly believe we can achieve that. The reason I believe we can achieve it in Scotland is that we have achieved it with the oil and gas sector. We lead the world in our expertise in that field, and we can do the same in renewables.

However, the issue is not just about all those things; there are also massive opportunities for the Scottish economy. Primarily, those will come from exports and the ability to turn renewables electricity into clean, green hydrogen, and again, to export that not only to our friends and allies across the UK, but across Europe using the hydrogen backbone. We have to aspire to that because it will bring not only employment and good jobs, but core economic value for the Scottish economy, which we will need when we break free from this place in the not too distant future.

What does that mean in real terms? It means around £25 billion of gross value added and 300,000 jobs by 2045. Do not take my word for it; take the word of David Skilling, who has produced a report of this very nature in recent weeks. The opportunities and the scale for Scotland are huge, but we need to grasp those opportunities and make sure they are delivered.

There are challenges, however—obvious challenges, some of which have been touched on in the debate. There is the concerting challenge of ensuring that these projects, which we want to come on stream, do come on stream at pace with jobs locally. Those local jobs will not appear in the next year or two, and maybe not even in the next five years: we cannot click our fingers and create an industrial base, but we can in the years to follow, and we must make sure that we do.

There are challenges in relation to the grid, which I hope the Minister will address, and challenges in relation to TNUoS—transmission network use of system—charges, whereby renewables projects off the coast of Scotland pay to access the grid and projects in the south-east of England get paid to access the very same grid. That is an inequity that should not stand: we have the highest grid charges not just in the UK, but in Europe. If we want to fulfil our potential, we need the UK Government to act in the interim, and we need to be free from this place to make our own decisions in the longer term.

One important thing has been mentioned by absolutely nobody. We have heard a little about skills and ensuring that we upskill people on our island. I do not disagree with that but, as the Government say all too often, employment is at a record low, so where are the people coming from? We need people to come from elsewhere and we need the Government to change their immigration policies because the reality is that the volume of jobs that need to be filled cannot be filled without a change to those immigration policies. We do not just need to talk about skills; we need to talk about that reality, and it is about time the Government got real.