GB Energy chief executive Dan McGrail will face further questions next week from MPs concerned around the slow creation of green jobs.
Mr McGrail will give evidence to the Scottish Affairs Committee on Wednesday as part of its inquiry into GBE and the transition to net zero.
Its first phase report, published last month, said that until clean energy jobs can be created at the scale needed to match current job losses, the UK government should put the brake on measures that lead to further erosion of the oil and gas labour force.
Mr McGrail, a former CEO of RenewableUK, was initially hired as GB Energy CEO on an interim basis which was made permanent from October.
He can expect questions on what investments are being made so that the generation of green energy jobs can be accelerated. He may also be asked about plans by the Chinese to invest in the UK’s clean energy sector.
He told a business conference in Aberdeen in May that the organisation would move rapidly from policy to delivery.
Addressing the event organised by Prosper, he said GB Energy will have the explicit role of an “activist investor”, identifying opportunities and accelerating them where private markets are too slow or risk-averse.” It will focus on floating offshore wind, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage (CCS), local energy solutions.
In a podcast he said he wanted to be judged by the impact it makes through its support for projects which will be “measured in the thousands of jobs”.
The chair of GB Energy Juergen Maier told the committee in October last year that there would be 1,000 jobs at the state-backed investment vehicle’s Aberdeen HQ, a claim he subsequently rowed back on. He said he wanted the HQ to be ‘lean’ and for thousands of jobs to be created across the industry.
Earlier this month Scotland Secretary Douglas Alexander told the committee it was never the intention of the Labour government to create 1,000 jobs at the headquarters of GB Energy in Aberdeen.
He said: “We promised to set up a publicly-owned energy company and our government has done it. The work is getting under way.
“The intention was never to create jobs for a thousand civil servants working in a large office in Aberdeen.
“The opportunity, the potential to be harnessed, was to ensure that both in Aberdeen and indeed across the north east and Scotland and the UK we use £8.5bn of taxpayers’s money both to build the supply chain, to secure strategic investment for the taxpayer and deliver economic security.”
The committee’s first phase report on GB Energy also called for a “pragmatic approach” to North Sea licensing policy and clarification on how developers may be allowed to drill under existing exploration licences. This was seen as endorsement of the Rosebank application by Norwegian firm Equinor.
#Energy #CEO #McGrail #faces #grilling #green #jobs #Daily #Business