Energy Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2015-09-14
Topic: Energy
Robin Teverson (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, perhaps I may intervene on a couple of those issues. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, completely forgets about the demand side in demand response management. That will become a lot simpler and more important as time goes on. No other part of economics that works properly in this world concentrates only on supply and ignores demand. That is one of the real challenges in policy-making, and it is starting to move forward. On investment and guaranteed returns, I agree. When people investing in renewables sometimes complain about what is going on, I often compare the energy system to the common agricultural policy, as was, and say that this is heaven: there are guaranteed prices out into the future. Why do we do that? Because it is recognised that the Government are not going to invest, CEGB-wise, as they did in the old days. The biggest component in that conversion is capital costs. The biggest way you can make a difference to the cost of high-capital-intensity energy—not just renewables but nuclear and a lot of other technologies too—is by keeping the cost of money absolutely down. That is a decision that we make for good policy reasons: to keep the cost of energy as low as possible because the capital costs and cost of financing are as low as possible The noble Lord asked when we will get to a point where we stop subsidising. I suppose the answer is when we start charging fossil fuels the cost of the pollution that they put into the atmosphere and what they are going to cost future generations who will have to cope with climate change—next to the migration issues that they will face in the future, what we have now is nothing—along with all the issues and costs that there will be around it. When fossil fuels count that back into the present cost, that is how a realistic carbon price can be arrived at, as is often talked about on all sides of the House. That is one way of doing it but we have not managed to do it sufficiently. The Chancellor in the previous Government decided to cap the carbon price floor where it was, so that policy has been blocked as well. Those are some of the answers to the noble Lord’s questions. Are we left with a perfect world? No, we are not. That is why we have a mixture of technologies at the moment to try to drive this agenda forward, so that we move towards a sane and safer future for us all There are two important points here. First, I am probably on the same agenda as the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, on the gas side, but the way to get gas into this equation is to take coal out of it. That is the most important thing that we can do, as Dieter Helm often preaches at us as policymakers. So that whole area needs to be taken into consideration Secondly, it is one of the ironies that through this legislation we are throwing away one of the cheaper, though admittedly not perfect, technologies. Yes, there is variability in wind power. As I have said many times in this House, I can see many wind turbines from my own house. Do they ever stop? Hardly ever but, while it is not intermittency, I agree that there is a high degree of variability. However, I remember a government statistic from about five years ago, when we had started going through the alternative planning system for major infrastructure projects in the Moses Room. This was a time when wind power did not make up the proportion of energy generation that it does now and then the utilisation of the total UK fleet of generators—sometimes we make it sound as if it were something like 90% to 95%—was in fact 50%. So we have major redundancy even within our conventional power systems. Some of these arguments can be rather exaggerated.