Correspondence between the Scottish Government and National Grid: EIR release

Information requested

In your correspondence you referenced that you have been in contact with Ofgem regarding SSEN’s proposed electricity transmission infrastructure between Kintore in Aberdeenshire and Tealing in Angus. In Ofgem’s response to your request it highlighted the Electricity System Operator’s annual Network Options Assessment and transitional Centralised Network Plan. I understand you have searched through the ESO’s Holistic Network Design and Network Options Assessment methodology reports and found a reference to the ESO’s Central Design Group, in which “Representatives of the Devolved Administrations” are noted as observers.

Provide details of any meetings or correspondence between the Scottish Government and National Grid ESO in this capacity.  Please provide details of the degree and nature of any input from the Scottish Government, especially regarding environmental, landscape, social, community or health impacts of the Kintore to Tealing project (TKUP).

Response

As the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the ‘public interest test’. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

I have enclosed a copy of most of the information you requested as attachments to this letter. Please note that unfortunately due to file sizes some will follow by email separately.

One of the pieces of correspondence, that falls under this request, is already held in the public domain and can be accessed here. Under regulation 6(1)(b) of the EIRs, we do not have to give you information which is already publicly available and easily accessible to you in another form or format. If, however, you do not have internet access to obtain this information from the website listed, then please contact me again and I will send you a paper copy.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance redactions have been made from some of the information you have requested because exceptions under regulations 11(2) (personal information) and 10(f)(5) (prejudice to interests of person who provided the information) of the EIRs applies to that information. The reasons why these exceptions apply are explained in the attached annex to this letter.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

EIR- 202400409730 - Information released

File type

57 page PDF

File size

1.6 MB