Local Authority ownership of energy in Scotland: EIR release

Information requested

The Energy Savings Trust have recently published the latest edition of the Community and Locally Owned Energy in Scotland report covering the figures for 2023: https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/report/community-and-locally-owned-energy-in-scotland-2023-report/ Appendix B shows that Local Authority ownership is 162MW and 12,550 installations. Could you please provide a breakdown of these figures by each local authority. 

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.

You will find the figures you requested in the attached document; however please be advised the figures are provided by the Scottish Government’s service provider, the Energy Saving Trust. Although the Energy Saving Trust aim to be robust in their data collection and take due care to minimise data and information gaps, it is important to highlight the figures attached are subject to the same limitations and caveats as detailed in the Community and Locally Owned Energy in Scotland 2023 report. The number of installations is rounded to the nearest ten and the capacity totals presented are rounded to the nearest megawatt (MW). This is for consistency with the main report and disclosure control - to prevent people, including installation owners themselves, from being able to identify installations and installation owners in categories where there is little data to report.

An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. The personal data of Energy Saving Trust employees has been redacted from the data released in this response; however, there have been no redactions made to the figures you requested. This exception is not subject to the 'public interest test', so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception.

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.

FOI - 202400415586 - Information released

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2 page PDF

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