This report
Looks at developments in the year since the initial Scot Wind investment
Examines claims around the committed investments in Scotland to support ScotWind’s supply chain
Compares the results of the initial auction to international examples
Examines claims by the Scottish Government that it cannot, in the devolved context, keep Scotland’s energy resources in public hands.
"― The ScotWind auction of January 2022 has massively undervalued Scotland’s offshore energy resources and placed a low and arbitrary maximum ceiling on the amount that competitors could bid for their development.
― In the year since its announcement, at least three more offshore wind auctions have concluded, two in the USA and one in England.
― All three of these auctions have raised many times more revenue for their respective governments than ScotWind did.
― On a comparative basis, these auctions have raised up to 40 times as much as ScotWind did.
― Had ScotWind raised as much on a per MW basis as New York Bight, Scotland would have raised £16.4 billion in a single payment. Had it matched the performance of the recent English auction, it may have raised up to £28 billion in annual payments across up to a decade.
― Beyond the financial disaster that ScotWind has been, the promises of supply chain protections have not been met. Only a little over a third of the minimum investments committed to ScotWind will take place in Scotland.
― Conditions on these minimum commitments all but guarantee that it would be profitable for companies to break the majority of these commitments.
― Even in the best case Ambition scenario, only around half of ScotWind’s investments will take place in Scotland.
― Recent announcements regarding Scotland’s “Green Freeports” raise the severe risk that at least part ScotWind will be constructed within Freeport Zones and may not be subject to normal levels of tax or protections for workers rights or the environment.
― The Scottish Government continues to dismiss out of hand the idea of and benefits of public ownership of renewable energy despite precedents now set by the Welsh Government on how this can be done within the devolved context and clear published blueprints for how involvement can be scaled up over time.
― The Scottish Government should conduct an inquiry into how it got the ScotWind auction so badly wrong and what steps it will take to redress these errors ahead of the next round of renewables development in Scotland."