ENERGY BILLS: SNP NOT TELLING THE TRUTH

The SNP has launched a new campaign - It’s Scotland’s Energy - which claims that independence would cut energy bills for Scottish households by more than a third.

Significantly, the paper which includes this claim is an SNP publication, not part of the Scottish Government series of independence papers.

Those papers were shot through with highly tendentious material, but the civil servants who produced them must have drawn the line at a whole-cloth fabrication. Because that is what the third-off energy bills claim is.

The central conceit of the paper is that Scottish renewables generate “low-cost” electricity.

When the results of the ScotWind leasing round were announced in January 2022, Nicola Sturgeon described it as a “truly historic” opportunity for Scotland’s net zero economy.

It’s still just an opportunity. None of the projects - mostly floating offshore wind - have yet been constructed. Only one is fully consented.

In last year’s Allocation Round 6, Scotland’s first commercial-scale floating offshore wind farm - Green Volt - secured a CfD (Contract for Difference) at £202/MWh (in today’s money).

That’s more than double the wholesale electricity price of £83/MWh in the current Ofgem price cap, and about 60% more expensive than the electricity which Hinkley Point C will produce.

The £202/MWh figure, which will be uplifted for inflation each year, is the guaranteed price for output the developers required before they would commit to spending the roughly £2.5 billion it will cost to construct the wind farm.

Projects of this nature depend entirely on subsidy and revenue stabilisation mechanisms made possible because costs can be defrayed across a population of 70 million.

Independence would take Scotland outside of these mechanisms.

How do we know this? Because the SNP has now told us. Its energy paper says that consumers in an independent Scotland would no longer contribute to the costs of nuclear plants in England and Wales.

Well fine. But that cuts both ways. Consumers in England and Wales would certainly not underwrite the high costs of ScotWind projects in an independent Scotland.

The maths is brutal and unavoidable. Developers can currently defray costs across a population of 70 million, no matter where they build an asset in Great Britain.

Losing 5 million people to defray costs over for England and Wales would be inconvenient. But losing 65 million people - the situation for an independent Scotland - would be catastrophic.

Energy bills would not fall by a third. If Scottish households had to bear the full costs of Scottish renewables, energy bills in an independent Scotland would be substantially higher.

This piece was first published by The Times (print edition only), on 17th December 2025.