THE UK Government has been urged to recommit its support for the Climate Change Act and publish a plan to ensure clean technology businesses and investors can have “the clarity they need to build new low-carbon infrastructure”.
At All-Energy 2017 at the SEC Centre yesterday, Nina Skorupska, chief executive of the Renewable Energy Association, said the Prime Minister’s “strong and stable” mantra must be extended to the renewables industry.
“All elections have themes, and as we all know, ‘strong and stable’ is the message Theresa May is taking to the country. For the renewables industry, strength and stability are things we crave more than any other. The past two years have seen my members rocked by policy change after policy change, and uncertainty following the Brexit vote. We have not seen a member unaffected. But we now have to put that behind us and push forward.”
The rapidly developing industrial biotechnology (IB) industry in Scotland was also in focus at the conference, which is being held in Glasgow for the third successive year.
In the past two years there has been an 18 per cent increase in Scottish IB turnover to £230m, exceeding by £30m the original 2015 target of the National Plan.
The Scottish Government target is for the sector to grow to £900m by 2025 and Paul Hudman, business development manager of Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC) said the group was pleased with progress. “No one went into this with a naïve idea that it would be easy, but it is a realisation that some of these technologies are completely transformational to what we have at the moment and it will take time to get investor confidence up.”
The conference coincided with one of the industry’s most prominent players, Celtic Renewables, received £9m in Scottish Government funding as part of the £43m that was committed to the low carbon infrastructure transition programme (LCITP).
Mr Hudman called this “fantastic” for the sector.
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