By Rab Bruce’s Spider

The UK Government have announced that subsidies for solar energy are to stop. As usual with the Tories, the details of precisely what is to stop and when are as yet unclear but it’s another step on their road to demolishing the burgeoning Renewable industry. You’d think there would be some sort of protest from the Scottish media but, in keeping true to form, BBC Scotland turned the news into an attack on the SNP.

Fergus Ewing MSP, the Energy Minister, was interviewed on Radio Scotland’s "Good Morning Scotland" programme and subjected to a series of increasingly bizarre and almost moronic questions in a bid to make him admit that the solar energy providers, and Renewables generally, should not receive subsidies. The interviewer must have repeated the word "subsidies" more than a dozen times just to make sure listeners understood that Renewables are costing them money. When fergus Ewing calmly pointed out that the nuclear industry receives far higher subsidies, this was brushed aside but it is an important point.

All Governments pay subsidies to certain industries. For example, our railways are still subsidised. That’s because they are important. The issue of whether the public and the Government are receiving value for money on railways is a separate issue but the point is that Governments choose which industries to subsidise in order to maintain them for the public good. The Tories have decided that nuclear power should receive subsidies but renewables should not. Their stated claim is down to the cost. However, as one industry analyst pointed out, the cost per household per year of subsidising solar energy is £3, while the cost per household per year of subsidising nuclear energy is £43, so this cost saving exercise seems to be aimed at the wrong area.

Undeterred by facts, the BBC interviewer then argued that it is unfair to subsidise the solar energy production because, as with other Renewable sources, the technology is still being developed and improved. His bizarre claim was that surely it would be better to stop subsidising these industries until they had reached a point where the technology was advanced enough to be implemented without subsidy. It’s as if he’d never considered that all new industries require investment for research and development. Yes, the Renewable sector is developing but it’s also generating a lot of electricity. The whole point of subsidising the industry is to allow it to grow, to improve the technology and to provide more and more energy until we cease to be so reliant on dirty sources of energy like nuclear and coal. What never seems to be considered by those who object to Wind Farms or Solar fields on aesthetic grounds is that, without these, they might be living next to a nuclear power station. They are never asked whether they’d prefer that. The Scottish Government’s aim is to increase Renewables in order to provide clean sources of energy.

If that sounds like a pipe dream, consider Denmark. Several times in recent months, Wind and Solar power has produced over 100% of Denmark’s electricity. In fact, they are now exporting power to the other Nordic countries on a regular basis.

So it is possible to develop your Renewable energy sources. All you need is the political will. And that’s the problem. The Tories, for whatever reason, don’t like Renewables and are plumping for hugely expensive nuclear power plants to fill the yawning gap being left by the closure of old coal and gas-powered electricity generating stations. This is an ideological choice, not a cost or efficiency one. Whatever their motives, it is Scotland that will feel the greatest impact, yet the Scottish Government was not consulted by Westminster on the Solar subsidy issue.

What a pity there was no way of avoiding this.