OOPS

SNP admits it overestimated Scotland's offshore wind capacity


Simon Johnson
Mon, 13 November 2023 

The largest wind turbine farm in the UK, Black Law wind farm, near Carluke, in Scotland - Construction Photography/Avalon

SNP ministers have quietly downgraded their claim that Scotland has a quarter of Europe’s offshore wind potential to just seven per cent, in a major blow to their economic case for independence.

Neil Gray, the Scottish energy secretary, wrote to a Holyrood committee with the revised estimate after SNP ministers were forced to admit that the 25 per cent figure they had used for years was false.

Emails disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act showed Mr Gray wanted to bury the update, with his officials writing that he was “not sure we need to draw attention to the issue with a letter to committee”.

His civil servants told him that was not possible as the Scottish Government had committed to informing parliament when a new figure had been calculated.

But they agreed to hush up the seven per cent estimate, saying: “No proactive communications are recommended.” This meant that no press release was issued or announcement made when he wrote to Holyrood’s net zero and energy committee in September.

The SNP had used the 25 per cent figure since 2010 and it was a keystone of the party’s economic case for independence. It was included in the Scottish Government’s white paper on separation, published before the 2014 referendum.

But a freedom of information request by think tank These Islands disclosed that servants had concerns about its accuracy more than three years ago, with officials stating in Oct 2020 that it had “proved very difficult to source”.
Official warning

Internal Scottish Government correspondence showed an official warned that it had “never, to my knowledge, been properly sourced”.

In January 2021, another civil servant warned that “we did recycle those figures quite robotically without really checking them”.

These Islands discovered that the 25 per cent figure was calculated by combining statistics from two old reports, one of which used a definition of Europe that included only 11 countries and was based on information from 1993.

But Angus Robertson, the SNP’s constitution secretary, was among the SNP ministers who persisted in using the figure and it was included in the Scottish Government’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation, which was published in March last year.

Ian Blackford, the SNP’s then Westminster leader, and other nationalist MPs repeated the claim again during a Commons debate on Scottish independence a year ago. The SNP’s Scottish Green coalition colleagues also tweeted it.

Responding to the updated estimate, Liam Kerr, a Scottish Tory MSP, said: “The SNP have been caught out yet again playing fast and loose with Scotland’s offshore energy potential.

“Ministers must be open and honest about giving accurate figures – secrecy and cover-up does the renewables sector no favours. This is yet another example of a government that thinks it can get away with anything.”
Overstating share

Sam Taylor, who runs These Islands, said: “For over a decade, the Scottish Government was overstating Scotland’s share of Europe’s offshore wind potential by a factor of about four times.”

In his letter to Sir Edward Mountain, the committee’s convener, Mr Gray noted that the Scottish Government had committed to revise the 25 per cent figure.

An accompanying annex said Scotland’s installed offshore wind capacity was more than 2GW, 16 per cent of the UK total. It said this was around seven per cent of Europe’s capacity and three per cent of world capacity.

It said that the Scottish Government wants to grow offshore wind capacity to 11GW by 2030, which it said would equate to around 10 per cent of the EU target for the same date.

But Mr Taylor said this was also misleading as it excluded capacity in the rest of the UK. If the latter was included, Scotland’s 2030 share would fall to 6.8 per cent.

Mr Taylor noted that this calculation also omitted capacity in Norway, which is not in the EU, which would “push Scotland’s share of a genuinely European total down towards six per cent”.

The Scottish Government was approached for comment.