Clean Heating Without Backup Leaves the Highlands Exposed

Scotland’s move to clean heating and electrification is intended to reduce emissions and modernise the energy system. But in the Highlands and islands, where storms, distance, older homes, fuel poverty and power cuts are already part of life, policy that increases reliance on electricity without securing backup heat and local resilience could leave vulnerable communities less safe.

The danger for the Highlands and islands is not net zero itself. The danger is net zero without backup.

That distinction matters. Scotland has a legal target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. The Climate Change Committee has said Scotland’s new carbon budget framework is consistent with that target, while also warning that delivery now has to broaden beyond electricity into heat, transport, buildings, land and industry. The direction of travel is therefore clear. Scotland is not merely changing how it generates power. It is changing how homes are heated, how vehicles move, how buildings are built, and how much ordinary life depends on electricity.

For much of urban Scotland, that may feel like a technical transition. For the Highlands and islands, it is also a resilience question.

A house in Glasgow with mains gas, dense local services, nearby shops, public transport and short repair distances does not face the same risk as a house in Sutherland, Skye, Tiree, Lewis, Orkney or Shetland. The geography is different. The weather is different. The cost of living is different. The consequences of failure could result in death.

Several of Scotland’s net zero policies press in the same broad direction: away from direct emissions heating and towards clean heating, often electricity based and commonly including heat pumps. That direction may be environmentally rational. It may also be economically necessary over time. But if the pace of change runs ahead of resilience, the Highlands and islands could be asked to rely too heavily on a single electricity dependent system before local backup is strong enough to carry the full burden.

That is not a small concern. In winter, heat is not a lifestyle preference.

The first policy to understand is the New Build Heat Standard. It requires new homes and buildings in Scotland to install climate friendly heating systems instead of oil and gas boilers. The Scottish Government’s own factsheet states that new homes and buildings must install climate friendly heating instead of oil and gas boilers. It also states that, after changes introduced from 1 January 2025, wood burning stoves and peat heating can be installed, and that wood burning stoves can be installed alongside a main heating system. The core rule remains that new buildings covered by the standard cannot use fossil fuel heating systems such as oil and gas boilers as their main heating system.

That change is important because it shows that resilience concerns from rural and island communities were not imaginary. They were serious enough to force a revision.

The original rules, which came into force in April 2024, allowed wood burning stoves in new homes only for emergency heating. After a review, the Scottish Government announced in November 2024 that wood burning stoves, bioenergy and peat heating would be permitted in new homes and buildings from January 2025. The Government said the review had addressed concerns from rural communities.

That episode should now be treated as a warning. A national heating policy that looked coherent on paper was altered after ministers accepted that rural and island resilience concerns required a different approach.

The second policy is the proposed Heat in Buildings legislation. The Scottish Government consultation asked for views on new laws around the energy efficiency of homes and buildings and the way those buildings are heated. The consultation analysis, published in January 2026, recorded that 67 percent of those who answered supported prohibiting the use of polluting heating systems in all buildings after 2045, with 46 percent strongly supporting and 21 percent somewhat supporting the proposal. It also reported support for minimum energy efficiency standards for private landlords by the end of 2028 and owner occupied homes by 2033.

But the same policy area has also drawn concerns about affordability, equity, building type, and the need for flexibility. That matters because the Highlands and islands contain many of the homes least suited to blunt national assumptions: older buildings, exposed sites, off gas grid properties, island homes, crofts, remote cottages and hard to treat structures.

The public record already recognises that rural, remote and island communities may require different treatment.

The third policy is the wider Energy Strategy and Just Transition approach. Its ambition is to move Scotland toward a cleaner, more secure and fairer energy system. But fairness cannot be judged on national averages alone. A transition can look affordable on a national model while remaining unsafe or unaffordable for the households furthest from the average.

The evidence is already there. Scottish island residents are generally more likely to face fuel poverty than the average Scottish resident. The Scottish Government’s Islands Data Overview says island and rural local authorities generally have the highest proportion of the least energy efficient dwellings. It also states that almost two thirds of rural dwellings are not connected to the gas grid and therefore rely on more expensive heating fuels such as electricity and oil.

The House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee reported in 2024 that the minimum cost of living in remote rural Scotland had been estimated at between 15 percent and 30 percent higher than in urban parts of the UK. It also noted that rural and island Scotland often faces more severe winters, higher transport and food costs, and greater reliance on heating oil or electricity because more rural homes are off the gas grid.

More recent national evidence points to the same structural risk. The Scottish House Condition Survey 2024 found that 42 percent of households using electricity as their primary heating fuel were in fuel poverty, compared with 27 percent using gas and 23 percent using oil. It also found that households in the social sector were more likely to be fuel poor than those in the private sector.

This is the hard contradiction. Net zero policy is moving Scotland toward electrification, but households already reliant on electricity for heat are among those most exposed to fuel poverty.

That does not mean heat pumps are bad. It means the economics and resilience of electrification have to be confronted honestly. A heat pump can be an efficient and sensible system in the right home, with the right insulation, the right design, the right electricity tariff, and the right backup. But a heat pump is still an electricity dependent system. If the power fails, the heat fails unless there is another source of warmth or stored heat. In a Highland winter, that is not a technical inconvenience. It is risk to life.

The Highlands and islands already know that electricity infrastructure can fail under weather pressure. SSEN, the distribution network operator for the north of Scotland, says high winds, extremely low temperatures, snow and heavy rain can damage the network, and that power cuts do sometimes happen despite annual investment in resilience.

Recent storms have shown the practical problem. During Storm Floris in August 2025, SSEN said it was working to reconnect 22,500 properties after damage from extremely high winds, with particular impact in the Highlands, Moray and Aberdeenshire. It also said transport disruption was affecting the ability of repair teams to reach faults in more remote areas.

During Storm Amy in October 2025, SSEN said more than 71,000 customers had been reconnected but 17,000 homes were still awaiting reconnection, and that most of the homes without power were in the Highlands. It also reported access challenges in the Highlands and Argyll. A later update said the storm had caused damage to more than 700 separate parts of the network and that more than 400 engineers and two dozen tree cutting teams were working in affected Highland areas.

Those are not speculative risks. They are recent operational facts.

This does not mean Britain’s power system is weak. It is not. The UK Government’s 2025 security of supply report says Great Britain is expected to have sufficient electricity and gas supply over the short and long term, and NESO forecast a winter 2025 to 2026 derated electricity margin of 6.1 GW, or 10 percent of average cold spell peak demand. The same report states that Britain benefits from a diverse electricity mix including gas generation, renewables, nuclear and interconnector imports.

NESO likewise said its 2025 to 2026 Winter Outlook had the strongest electricity margins in six years, driven by battery storage, greater availability of gas power stations and the Greenlink interconnector. It also cautioned that tighter periods can still occur in winter and that operational tools may be required to keep the system in balance.

That distinction is important. The normal winter security of supply picture may be adequate, while local and regional resilience can still be fragile. A national margin does not keep an isolated household warm during a local outage. A GB wide reliability standard does not clear fallen trees from a Highland line. A heat pump policy may reduce emissions over decades, but it does not answer the immediate question of what happens when an elderly resident loses power for two days in January.

Nor is the only risk ordinary weather. The UK National Risk Register recognises serious infrastructure risks, including electricity supply disruption, cyber attack, loss of communications and severe space weather. The register also recognises severe space weather as a serious national risk affecting infrastructure, communications and power systems.

This is not an argument for panic. It is an argument for redundancy. And redundancy is not waste. Redundancy is what keeps a system alive when one part fails. In medicine, it is backup oxygen. In aviation, it is duplicated controls. In rural energy, redundancy means a household or community is not wholly dependent on one grid connected electric system for warmth, cooking, communication and survival.

That is where current net zero policy needs a Highlands and Islands test.

A fair test would ask six questions before any clean heat rule, building standard or retrofit programme is imposed in remote Scotland.

Can the household remain safely warm during a power cut?

Can the system operate affordably in a poorly insulated or hard to treat home?

Can repairs be obtained quickly enough in remote areas?

Can vulnerable residents cope if electricity, communications and transport fail at the same time.

Does the property have a permitted secondary heat source.

Does the community have local resilience planning, including warm spaces, backup power, emergency communication and welfare checks.

If the answer to those questions is no, the policy is not ready for that place.

The better solution may be a formal Highlands and Islands resilience exemption or derogation. That means the region would still move toward lower emissions, but with explicit legal and policy protection for backup heat, local energy resilience and slower compliance where buildings, geography, poverty or grid vulnerability make standard rules unsafe or unreasonable.

Such a protection could include a permanent right to safe secondary heating in remote and island homes, including modern low emission bioenergy where appropriate and lawful. It could include exemptions or extended timelines for hard to treat buildings until insulation, grid capacity, installer availability and affordability support are in place. It could require resilience assessments before enforcement of clean heat rules. It could allow hybrid systems in defined circumstances where a single electric system would create unacceptable risk. It could require community level backup power for vulnerable communities, care facilities, medical equipment users, water systems and emergency shelters.

It should also require transparency. Every proposed major energy rule should publish a Highlands and Islands Resilience Impact Assessment. That assessment should not be a polite appendix. It should answer whether the policy increases dependency on a single point of failure, and what backup exists when that failure occurs.

There are practical solutions.

First, new and retrofitted Highland and island homes should be designed around heat resilience, not only carbon compliance. That means insulation, ventilation, thermal storage, efficient electric heating where suitable, and a legally permitted secondary heat source.

Second, heat pumps should be supported where they make sense, but not treated as a universal answer for every building and every location. Rural stone homes, exposed island properties, crofts, older cottages, tenements and off grid buildings need property specific design. The system should not punish people because their house was built before the policy arrived.

Third, Scotland should expand local energy systems. Community batteries, microgrids, local hydro, local wind, solar where suitable, and islandable systems can make clean energy more resilient. A community that can keep a hall, surgery, water system or shop powered during a wider outage is safer than one that waits for distant repair crews across closed roads or cancelled ferries.

Fourth, fuel poverty policy must be integrated into net zero policy. It is not acceptable to ask households already struggling with electric heat to bear more cost in the name of a cleaner system. If electricity is to become the main heat source, tariff reform, social tariffs, standing charge fairness and rural support become part of climate policy, not separate welfare questions.

Fifth, workforce planning must be rural. Heat pump installers, electricians, retrofit specialists and repair engineers cannot all be concentrated in the Central Belt. A clean heating system that cannot be repaired in winter is not a clean heating system in any meaningful public safety sense.

Sixth, emergency planning must be built into the transition. Councils, health boards, housing associations, network operators and community groups should identify households most at risk from power dependent heating. Priority service registers are useful, but they are not enough if the backup is weak.

Finally, ministers should state clearly that net zero does not mean removing all household resilience. The New Build Heat Standard revision on wood burning stoves, bioenergy and peat heating was a practical admission of that principle. It should now become a wider policy doctrine for rural Scotland.

This is where Scotland’s energy history matters.

The Highlands have already lived through one great electrification story. The North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board, created in 1943, was not only about producing electricity. It was about bringing modern power to remote communities as a matter of national development. That history should not be forgotten. The old hydro mission understood that infrastructure in the Highlands is not an urban policy with longer cables. It is a social contract across difficult geography.

Net zero now asks the Highlands and islands to enter a second electrification age. This one is cleaner, more digital, more complex and more dependent on integrated systems. But the moral question is the same. Does the infrastructure serve the people who live there, or does it merely serve national targets drawn from a distance.

The public should be alert, but not misled. Net zero does not automatically make the Highlands unsafe. But net zero policies that accelerate electrification without backup heat, grid resilience, local repair capacity, rural tariffs and emergency planning would increase risk in the very communities already most exposed to cold, distance and power disruption.

The correct public demand is not “stop net zero”. It is “do not remove redundancy before resilience exists”.

For the Highlands and islands, that should become a test of every clean heat policy from now on. A system that lowers emissions but leaves people cold during a winter outage has not been properly designed. A policy that looks tidy in Edinburgh but fails in a storm on Lewis, Skye or Sutherland is not serious enough for the country it claims to serve.

Scotland can pursue net zero and protect rural resilience. It must do both. If it cannot do both at the same time, then the pace, rules and exemptions must change until it can.

The Highlands and islands should not be exempted from the future. But neither should they be made experimental ground for a future without backup.

SOURCES
Climate Change Committee, Progress in reducing emissions in Scotland, 2025 report to Parliament. The report states that Scotland’s new carbon budget framework is consistent with reaching net zero by 2045 and says action must broaden beyond electricity to other sectors.

Scottish Government, New Build Heat Standard factsheet. The factsheet states that new homes and buildings must install climate friendly heating instead of oil and gas boilers, and that wood burning stoves and peat heating are permitted following changes from 1 January 2025.

Scottish Government, Wood burning stoves to be permitted in new homes, 8 November 2024. The announcement says ministers amended the New Build Heat Standard after concerns from rural communities.

Scottish Government, Heat in Buildings Bill consultation analysis, January 2026. The analysis records support among respondents for prohibiting polluting heating systems after 2045 and for minimum energy efficiency standards for landlords and owner occupied homes.

Scottish House Condition Survey 2024, Scottish Government. The survey found that 42 percent of households using electricity as primary heating fuel were fuel poor, compared with 27 percent using gas and 23 percent using oil.

UK Government, National Risk Register 2025, and National Audit Office, The UK’s resilience to severe space weather. These sources describe severe space weather as a recognised national risk affecting infrastructure, communications and power systems.