Busby LDES (Long Duration Energy Storage) project communication and responses: EIR release

Information requested

Communication and responses, in any form, between the South Lanarkshire Council, its officers and employees and any Scottish Minister or their officers and any members of their offices or contracted employees, regarding the proposed Apatura “Busby LDES”, identified by SLC and the ECU as application number P/25/0765.

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.

Please find attached Annex A which contains the information that we are able to provide in response to your request. For clarity, at the time of responding to this request, no formal application for the Busby LDES (Long Duration Energy Storage) project have been submitted to the Scottish Government for determination. The proposal is in the pre-application phase.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because:

• An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information.
• An exception under regulation 6(1)b of the EIRs (publicly available information) applies to some of the information. For information which is publicly available in relation to this case please visit our website Scottish Government - Energy Consents Unit - Application Details .This includes all published documents related to this Development.

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. 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.

An exception 6(1)(b) of the EIRs (information already available) 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 exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception, as the information is already publicly available.

About FOI

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

EIR 202500478310 - Information released - Annex A

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