District Heating and Decarbonising Heating

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at on 6 March 2014.

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Photo of Rob Gibson Rob Gibson Scottish National Party

I welcome the fact that we are having a debate on renewable heat in the context of Scotland’s adjusted emissions having fallen by 25.7 per cent from 1990, and our being over half way to achieving our target to reduce CO2 equivalents by 40 per cent by 2020.

That is the biggest fall in emissions in the countries of the European Union 15 since 1990, so it allows us to think that we are in an achievement zone and not in one in which we should castigate ourselves—although we should, of course, always be aware that we can do better.

I welcome the draft statement’s overall target to deliver 1.5 terawatt hours of heat through district heating, and to supply 40,000 homes with affordable low-carbon heat by 2020. I want to dwell on some aspects of district heating and, in particular, the problems of dealing with hard-to-heat and hard-to-treat houses in our rural areas.

I welcome the heat map that is to be published very soon—in April—which will provide planning authorities with the knowledge base to highlight in their development plans heat opportunities including heat recovery, district heating, renewable heat and low-carbon heat. As we know from our discussions on the national planning framework 3, many development plans are out of date and need to be brought up to date in order to ensure that affordable housing, including council housing, is built in a fashion that allows renewable heat to be included. Such schemes should be part of development plans.

I want to look at the renewable heat situation in Wick in Caithness, where I have my constituency office. Ignis Wick, which is one of two projects that have received £400,000 to make them work, has been a great success since it took over from a council scheme in June 2012. It has added another 37 domestic dwellings to the original 165, as well as Wick assembly rooms, Caithness general hospital and Mackays hotel. Other customers include Old Pulteney distillery, which is an important part of our infrastructure. The fact that wood fuel from local sources has been used to fire up the system is welcome, as is the fact that all Ignis Wick’s customers get heat at a lower cost than they would if they did it for themselves. In the case of domestic customers, the tariff is 20 per cent lower than the price of natural gas. For an average user, that is equivalent to a saving of £200 per year.

That is the benefit that a district heating system brings to one part of the town of Wick. I believe that Ignis wants to seek more support so that it can deliver the scheme on the north side of the town. Like many towns, Wick is built along a river, and taking the system across the river is quite a logistical problem. We look forward to Ignis’s proposals for doing that, and people in the north part of Wick look forward to receiving the service that people in the south of the town—particularly those in Pulteneytown—already receive.

The Minister for Housing and Welfare, Margaret Burgess, has said:

“We are doing everything that we can within our limited powers to provide a wide range of energy efficiency measures to individual households and to local authorities.”

She said that the Government is looking at rural areas, in particular. However, I have been told about a catalogue of problems with delivery of the measures, particularly when the deliverer, Scottish Gas, brings in subcontractors from areas that are far from those that are being targeted. The procurement process ought to allow more local people to bid to deliver such systems.

Calor Gas is right to say that

“while the modelling does take into account off-grid economics, there is little in the strategy that focuses on off-grid solutions.

I would like to hear a little more about some of those off-grid solutions when the minister winds up the debate.

A problem has been created for small-scale anaerobic digestion, which could provide district heating systems. It has been brought to my attention that the Department of Energy and Climate Change in London has introduced a misconceived 20 per degression in the feed-in tariff for smaller AD schemes, which will harm a number of British companies and prevent new AD plants in the next three to five years, unless there is a change in the budget this April. We look forward to finding a way forward that includes small anaerobic digestion schemes in places where there are farms that can provide the material and where it could be used for district heating.

I like the idea from Scottish Renewables to have a national indicator to show the increase in renewable heat production as part of the national performance framework. I hope that the Government will take up that idea and make such an indicator available, because I believe that as people see our success in delivering renewable heat, they will be encouraged to take part. I look forward to the minister’s response on that in his closing remarks.