Climate Change and SustainableEnergy Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I completely agree that we should not be put off by the cost. If we had been put off by the cost of early computers and concluded that they would never make a contribution to business or to the consumer, we would never have engaged in the research and development that has resulted in their being so indispensable today. I am absolutely certain that the costs will fall. We should take a dynamic view of the state of technology. It is evolving very rapidly. The example that I cited uses solar power to generate electricity rather than to heat water, which is much more flexible, as my hon. Friend will appreciate, and allows it to be transferred, in effect, from the house in which it was generated to the national grid and to other houses in the vicinity. It is particularly admirable that the constituent to whom I referred is the deputy head of a very good junior school, St. Paul’s in Rusthall in my constituency. I know from my postbag, and I am sure that other hon. Members find, that young people are among the most interested in the technology of new sources of energy and the concerns about climate change that we all address in our correspondence with them, and it is particularly good to have a role model. I now turn to some specific aspects of the Bill, which I welcome. It was watered down in Committee to a regrettable extent. Nevertheless, it represents progress. It takes a step forward in energy policy by recognising the contribution of microgeneration. Microgeneration makes a contribution in several ways, which I commend to the House and which the Bill reinforces. First, it contributes to the heating of space and water, as we have seen in the case of the gentleman in my constituency whom I mentioned. That contribution is tangible, immediate and it is not years away from development. Given that the heating of space and water accounts for a considerable proportion of national annual energy consumption—higher, indeed, than the proportion accounted for by electricity consumption—that is important. Secondly, the model of microgeneration has the potential to overturnthe centralised approach to electricity generation,which, as we know, involves enormous costs in therunning of transmission and distribution systems. Microgeneration is taking us into a new paradigm, and it is good that the Bill recognises the progress that we are making here. Thirdly, combined heat and power, although it has not had the full support that we hoped it would have, is recognised in the Bill. The great advantage of microCHP is that it is ready to go, it is nonintermittent, which is important, and it requires no planning permission or special infrastructure to be established. Solar panels are, of course, all very well and wind turbines can make a contribution, but they are intermittent. If we are to make a step change in renewable energy, we need to be able to generate a base load of dependable energy generation, on top of which we can add the intermittent sources. The great advantage of CHP and microCHP is that, because they are nonintermittent, they can provide the foundation on which some of the solar and other renewable energy sources can build. Finally, it is important to recognise that microgeneration may have a vital role to play in the eventual emergence of a hydrogen economy. We know that there are problems with the electrolytic production of hydrogen and its distribution. That may mean that the best model for hydrogen power is local and decentralised. The microgeneration initiatives that the Bill supports open a new paradigm that may be instructive. We all know that energy policy is subject to constant change, not least because of the rapidly developing technology. It is important that we keep pace with that. I hope that this will not be the last Bill that comes before the House and brings us up to date. I commend the Bill for taking the first steps in that direction. It signals perhaps the end, notwithstanding the current energy review, of what we may call the Jurassic age of energy policy, when massive decisions about massive generating plants and distribution mechanisms were taken by a small number of people, including the Minister for Energy and his predecessors. With the greatest respect to the Minister, I hope that it will not be possible for our energy policy to be determined by a single individual, but that it will be determined, in effect, by the individual decisions of millions of consumers of energy across the country.