Energy Bill

The hon. Gentleman is right. A sensible community would manage a whole river basin in a much more sustainable way than we do now. We are trying to do that in Somerset and some other parts of the country, but that means taking energy from the river, using appropriate storage of water to prevent flooding and using the entire ecosystem in a water basin in the most effective way, so the hon. Gentleman is right. What are the current difficulties? The Minister knows what they are, because I have written to him, as have those who operate the mills, who have also had meetings with his Department and tried to explain the issues. The principal issue is the definition of microgeneration for hydro power. We have mixed definitions of the maximum allowable in microgeneration, but the most effective one, including in respect of the renewables obligation certificate, is a maximum of 50 kW. However, a great number of water turbines generate between 50 kW and 100 kW. I accept that 50 kW is a perfectly viable maximum for many renewable sources; one would need quite a large photovoltaic array on top of one's house to reach 50 kW. However, that is not a large figure for a water turbine. Indeed, at its best, the technology used in the new water turbines generally produces more than 50 kW. We conducted a survey of the 100 or so mill installations that I have mentioned in Somerset and Dorset. That survey could be taken as proving the Government's point. The majority of those mills—89 of them—generated less than 50 kW and only 13 generated more. However, those 13 generated more electricity than the other 89 put together. If we are interested in getting the maximum yield of renewable electricity, the 50 kW cut-off is absurd. Because 50 kW is the cut-off for the double ROC, those who have installed such facilities or who intend to do so have a strange decision: either they run their installation at less than full capacity, in order to keep within the double ROC maximum, or they take a financial loss. What sort of policy nonsense is it to have renewable capacity, but run it at less than full capacity? There is of course an extra financial loss, because the 50 kW maximum is also used for the income tax exemption, so there is a double hit. The other financial difficulty that many people face concerns the grid connection, which has already been mentioned. I am told that a 400 m connection can cost £16,500. That is a lot of money on top of the initial capital outlay already required. Oddly enough, mills are usually on rivers and are not normally very close to communities; therefore, there is an inherent cost in providing the infrastructure required to run a renewable installation. The second issue that I want to raise is the licensing regime. It seems that the Environment Agency has never talked to the energy Department, in whatever form it has taken, about what is needed. If one tries to get a water abstraction licence for one's water mill, one might be told that one needs an abstraction licence, an impoundment licence or a transfer licence—one might even be told to get all three—all that for water that never leaves the river. It goes into a leat, is used by the turbine and is returned to the river. It is nonsense to call that an abstraction, yet all those licences are obligations, dealt with by the Environment Agency, that have to be paid for. One has to apply for them and go through all the bureaucracy that comes with that. There is no consistency in the way that the system is applied. I have two mills in my constituency, one of which I have mentioned. Tellisford has an impoundment licence, while Stowford, which is a little further down the stream, has an abstraction licence. The mills do the same thing, but the Environment Agency is determined that they need different licences, whereas another mill on the same river, Lullington, needs all three licences. Surely, it is not beyond the wit of the Government to devise a single licensing regime for micro hydro generation that obviates what I describe, particularly given that water is not being abstracted. Not only does one need a licence, but one has to report daily on one's abstraction. No water is leaving the watercourse, but one still has to report to the Environment Agency every day about how much water one has abstracted from the stream into one's leat, and how much one has passed back from the leat into the river. It is the same amount on either side. That is also nonsense. Each year, from every mill, 365 flow readings go to the Environment Agency, which I doubt is desperate for more work, but that achieves nothing because the same water is going in and out. Another issue that the Environment Agency is very concerned about is reserved flow, but for all the reasons that I have given, there is no consequence from a mill stream taking water into a loop and then feeding it back into the main watercourse. The stream has probably done that for hundreds of years. That is not a new thing; it was there before the water turbine and will be there after it, but the Environment Agency thinks it an important thing to measure. Interestingly, an Environment Agency officer said to Mr. Battersby, who gave me this information:"““We are very good at measuring change, but absolute rubbish at deciding if it matters or not.””" That sums up the regime in which those officers are working. The final subject that I want to talk about is fish. I do not want to be unkind to fish. They are very important, and I do not want to do anything that would be detrimental to the safety or health of the various species. The Environment Agency considers water turbines to be a major hazard to fish, even in a stream that has no migrating species. I understand the need to put facilities in a stream along which salmon or trout migrate and need a passage through a weir or need to bypass a turbine, but not if there are no migrating species. If the weir has been there for hundreds of years, the fish, if they have any species memory, will presumably know that it is there by now, and will use the main river course instead, rather than bump into the weir and hurt their snouts. That is not a serious issue. Why, then, does the Environment Agency expand it to become a major obstacle to the production of energy from this source? I do not wish to detain the House any longer, but I want the Minister to understand that many people are desperate to invest in renewable energy and they have the means to do so in a way that is socially and environmentally responsible. They can make a real contribution—not the biggest contribution in the world, but a real contribution nevertheless—to providing energy into the system. Obstacles and impediments are in their way, which could be avoided if only the Department and the Environment Agency would take these concerns seriously. I do not intend to press my new clause to a Division, but rather like that put forward by the hon. Member for Nottingham, South, mine provides a year for the Government to get their house in order and provide the necessary changes to regulation in order to accomplish what we all want. I hope that the Minister will not tell me just what is technically wrong with the new clause. I am sure that he can find something wrong with it, but that is not the point. My intention was to stimulate debate about one small sector of renewable energy that we could encourage to a much greater extent if we avoided the obstacles and made the fiscal arrangements more appropriate than they are now. I would love it if the Minister were to stand up and declare that he supports the feed-in tariff proposal, and if he will not, I hope that the House will persuade him to change his mind. In the same breath, I hope that he will also look seriously at the issues in my new clause, and put in the necessary changes in order to stimulate this small but important sector of microgeneration.