Energy Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2015-09-14
Topic: Energy
David Arthur Russell Howell (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I, too, am waiting for my noble friend Lord Ridley to give his limpid views on the future of onshore wind and, indeed, on the role of onshore and offshore wind power in the tasks of reducing emissions worldwide and producing a balanced energy policy for the British people. No doubt he will enter into later debates on the next clause which will cover very much the same ground I admire the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for his frank admission of the dilemma he faces. On the one hand, localism is the flavour of the month, the year and the time, and there is a great desire to move from central administration in every area of policy, certainly including energy, into a greater role for local people, local planning and local authorities, yet he is also worried about inconsistency and fears that in some way the onshore wind cause is being abandoned. I do not see that. If you look at the proposals and the argument in the impact assessments behind the Bill, it is perfectly clear that, first, onshore wind has had a fantastic run over recent years. Some would say it was possibly too big a run given the very considerable economic advantages it brought to many wealthy individuals, gigantic corporations and energy companies and to those who are benefiting in all sorts of other ways from the proceeds and the subsidies, which are, of course, paid for by the consumer. In many cases, we know it is the poor consumer, and it is certainly the competitive consumer in industry. It is clear that subsidies have created this great growth. There must be a limit, as has been set quite clearly by government, and it is going to be exceeded unless the brakes are put on. There is a limit in two senses: first, the sheer weight of subsidy required to maintain the industry until it can get its costs down. I will come to that in a moment because there are real problems in getting costs down Secondly, there is managing a balanced grid system which can absorb the intermittency of wind. Every country that has gone into this business in a big way—Denmark is a good example—has found enormous difficulties. That is one reason why Denmark wants to have an interconnector with Britain for electricity. Intermittently there will be no charge at all for the electricity it supplies to us because it is a danger to it and an advantage to us. Spain has found enormous difficulties in going too fast and beyond the limits of engineering and electronic management in organising its grid when the wind blows too hard or too regularly Thirdly, there is the intermittency problem, which we all face. One day we will get over it because the storage will come at lower costs and intermittency problems will be much reduced. In the mean time, though, intermittency requires back-up, and back-up requires gas. There are other devices but gas-generated electricity is the area where most people in Europe, certainly in this country, think the gap can be filled. Far from being inconsistent, then, it seems to me utterly consistent that at this point the contribution of onshore wind should be restrained in the ways that are proposed As for the emissions angle, we know that we are driven by the European requirements for renewable energy, the formidable target of 15% of our energy from renewable sources by, I think, 2020, and Europe’s target of 40% by 2030. It is quite clear from the present pattern that we are not going to meet that target, and that even if we were to double the onshore wind power we still would not get near it, even if we took into account merely the emissions that emerge from the production of energy. In fact, the emissions that emerge from our capital consumption of energy per head, and from all the vast imports that we suck into this country from countries with much lower standards with very high emission content, have not fallen very much at all; indeed, many would argue that they have increased greatly since 1990. So the real problem is that the present policy is not actually working. Those of us who are concerned about climate change look at what is happening throughout Europe, notice the contrary tendencies in delivering emission reduction—much more coal burning and a failure of the heavy concentration of wind around the islands, like the one that we are living on—and ask whether we should not begin to think about an entirely new and different policy. I see no inconsistency at all. No doubt we will debate this a little further on in the afternoon in more depth and detail I worked very closely with my friends in the Liberal Democrats in the last Government and enjoyed doing so, but I find their stance on this almost impossible to understand. They seem to be favouring a system that does not do much for emissions, distributes money in massive ways from the poor to the rich and apparently produces all kinds of tax advantages that are going to be exploited. This is one irony of the situation: even with this restraint, it looks to me as though we are going to have continuous investment in onshore wind, even without the subsidies, because of the big tax advantages that are built into the system. Should we not be looking at those before we take a position on the question of local powers and so on It is a puzzle to me that we do not look in a more balanced way at what is being done. It seems utterly consistent. I do not think that I want to be a supporter of anything that promotes further a system that is unfair to the poorest people and consumers, and which delivers considerable tax advantages to clever people and yet does not do very much at all for emission reduction. It seems to me to be a sad mixture, and it is about time that it was changed.