How the tide is finally turning against climate absolutism about oil and renewables – John McLellan

Perhaps it’s the change of keyholder in Downing Street, or increasingly grim warnings about the impact of soaring energy prices and public borrowing, but in the last month a switch seems to have been flicked. When it can cost £100 for a tank of petrol and average annual household energy bills are not far short of £2,000, the typical voter won’t be jumping with delight like a whinnying pit pony kicking its hind legs at the sight of daylight, but both north and south of the Border some sense of reality is emerging, and the list of pragmatic positions on power and artificial intelligence (AI) is growing.

Scottish public finance minister Hannah Mary Goodlad has already resisted demands for a full data centre moratorium and last week her colleague, innovation, technology and tertiary education minister Alyn Smith, used a column in the Herald newspaper to liken AI opponents to Victorians fearful of change condemning new-fangled lightbulbs as “a dangerous anti-candle device”. It was hardly designed to curry favour with the aggressive, Green-led campaign to keep Scotland in the slow lane of technological innovation, but it has given serious data centre investors much-needed encouragement that, with the right conditions, they will be able to proceed.

READ MORE: SNP putting 'thousands of jobs at risk' with failure to triple Scotland's onshore wind capacity On the back of the UK government’s supportive Data Centre Covenant, it is the clearest sign yet that the SNP has no intention of turning its back on AI or large-scale data centres. Even with council elections next year, the political impact of producing planning guidance broadly similar to the Covenant, due before Christmas, is unlikely to be significant beyond the immediate location of the most unpopular proposals.

And not all are facing implacable and irresistible resistance. No one in the data centre sector denies they are power hungry, but counter-intuitive it may be, they can help reduce domestic bills by harnessing ‘constrained’ energy when turbines are switched off because there is no grid capacity. When the grid can’t cope, the operators are paid to keep the turbines idle, with the cost passed on to consumers, so if there is a use for energy which would otherwise go un-generated then the compensation isn’t paid and bills should therefore come down.

Such guaranteed income for energy companies has been a racket for years, tolerated by both the Scottish and UK governments in the belief that renewable capacity was everything in the fight against climate change and the grid would eventually catch up. No wonder the Scottish Onshore Wind Developers Forum claimed this week that if they could treble their notional capacity, it could generate £4.2 billion for the country, or rather them. READ MORE: SNP ministers were warned oil and gas slump driving renewables investment out of Scotland But reality is sinking in and last week Chancellor John Healey announced a veto on new renewable energy projects if they will not lower bills, effectively putting power firms on notice that they can’t just carry on erecting turbines and expect to be paid no matter what.

While there is little evidence to suggest the UK government is retreating completely from a pro-renewables agenda, it’s certainly a clear signal it is not prepared to tolerate consumers being used as cash cattle by foreign renewable companies like Canada’s Boralex and Switzerland’s Galileo, whose speculative applications litter the landscape. Clean power, said the Chancellor, is “how we break the grip of international gas prices on our bills”, but he added that it needed to be “at the right pace, in the right places, with the grid to carry it”.

It’s astonishing this needs to be pointed out, and the Scottish government’s approach has set landowners keen to cash in on power deals against their communities, prompting a campaign against the further advance of windfarms amongst community councils from Orkney to Galloway. Mr Healey has no such remit in Scotland, but the Court of Session introduced a legal blocker with a ruling in February, which the Scottish government’s controversial Energy Consents Unit has so far accepted, that renewable energy planning applications cannot be considered in isolation of any new connections needed to feed the juice into the grid.

READ MORE: Stalled floating offshore wind projects risks leaving Scottish ports as 'stranded assets' Nevertheless, overall Scottish government energy policy picture is still as clear as North Sea haar on a windless day, and everyone – except anti-growth Greens and Nicola Sturgeon loyalists still wedded to Bute House Agreement, plus a few of Labour’s implacable anti-capitalists – can see the sense in exploiting the Jackdaw gas field if it means reducing reliance on imported gas.

The SNP can try to hide its internal divisions behind the UK government’s responsibility for issuing North Sea licences, but it didn’t stop First Minister John Swinney tying himself in knots by repeatedly refusing to answer a straightforward question from three opposition leaders about supporting oil extraction at Rosebank, while in the same exchange seeming to oppose North Sea tax rises to protect jobs. That two questions were from Labour’s Michael Marra and the Conservatives’ Russell Findlay on one side, and pro-abandonment Green Ross Greer on the other, just exposed the unsustainability of Mr Swinney’s Janus-faced position.

Just because the decision is no longer his to take and the UK Treasury is already banking on the Rosebank tax receipts, that doesn’t mean voters can’t appreciate the comedy value of Honest John being anything but. It has been a long time coming, but gradually the tide against climate and anti-business absolutism is turning. The temperature has been turned down on potentially disastrous heat-in-buildings legislation, valuable and necessary North Sea oil and gas resources will be exploited, unnecessary windfarms will be blocked and data centres will be built in Scotland.

The next fight should be against the outdated, ideological rejection of the solutions that small nuclear power offers for data centre energy demand, greenhouse gas emissions and landscape despoilation. Just one more switch to flick.