Energy Bill

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, who made what I thought was a very good, Guardian-style speech, upbraiding the Government for their general conservatism in this area. I noted, from reading the Committee and Report stage debates in the Commons on the Bill, that there was a degree of Conservative backsliding by a number of her colleagues. The revival of climate-change scepticism is there on the Conservative Benches—in both Chambers, indeed—as well as Euroscepticism. I hope that the noble Baroness’s excellent speech demonstrates that the Conservative leadership, at least, is standing up to what a number of American writers now call the politics of irrationality in the Republican Party, to which the Conservative Party is sometimes tempted to bend. This is a modest Bill and we are grateful for small mercies, but we do not see it as being up to the scale of the challenge which we face. Our party has also put out its proposals for sustainable growth and a move towards a sustainable economy, in which we shift the balance away from centralisation and privatisation towards a much more decentralised system with an emphasis on small-scale generation, insulation, local schemes and integrated schemes wherever possible, as against the Government’s emphasis on centralised coal and centralised nuclear—coal which is, I note, incidentally, more and more imported coal. Indeed, as I work my allotment in Saltaire, the Settle-Carlisle railway line brings imported coal down to Yorkshire power stations from Cumbrian ports. It is not, any longer, local coal; it is part of our energy dependence. The whole question of carbon capture and storage is not so much a matter of increasing our energy security, but making sure that the South African and Polish coal which we import does not add to the pollution above our land. I welcome the demonstration project which Yorkshire has now managed to secure from the European Union and notice that the European Union, in awarding that to Hatfield, mentioned that part of the attraction of the demonstration project is, indeed, that it has the potential to be part of a much broader scheme for carbon capture and storage across Yorkshire. I drove with my wife from Lincoln over to Saltaire this summer and I was very struck, as we passed across the south Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire plain, to see, against the skyline, a succession of huge coal power stations and their heating towers. You no longer see anything in the way of wind-power generation. There are the remnants of a large number of windmills, but nimbyism and the absence of long-term planning have inhibited the sort of renewable energy that we should be pursuing across that large chunk of northern England. We think that the Government should move a great deal further into what we call wind and wave. Indeed, as I walk up and down the Yorkshire Dales, I regularly pass the Grassington weir with its derelict power station, from which Grassington generated all the town’s electricity 60 or 70 years ago. I am conscious that we have all this unused potential small-scale water power in Yorkshire, which the Government have made very little effort to encourage. We now have one demonstration project, in Settle, so if we are looking for ways and means to move Britain towards renewable energy—local biomass, local water and so on—there is a great deal more that could be done. Feed-in tariffs have been very slow to be developed. It is now some 25 years since I was on holiday with my family in Brittany and we stayed on a farm, the water mill of which was already feeding locally-generated power into the French power system. Along with the Conservatives, we strongly support the proposal for an emissions performance standard and, indeed, on Report in the other place, we moved, with cross-party support, an amendment for an emissions performance standard which was to apply to all new electricity generation plant as a clear restriction on the amount of carbon dioxide that any new electricity generation plant can emit. That narrowly failed to pass in the other place. No doubt there will be discussions among the parties in this Chamber as to how far we wish to add that to the Bill. I look forward to those discussions. My party has larger ambitions on sustainable growth and in moving to a more sustainable economy. We want to see emissions reduced and we want a reduction in energy dependence and thus, incidentally, in our very substantial trade deficit. We look to new employment in new industries and to signals to the market which encourage everyone to invest in the reduction of carbon emissions. I noted with some puzzlement the statement in the analytical annexe to the low carbon paper that an oil price of $150 per barrel would help to reduce the costs of transition. There are a lot of other things that an oil price of $150 per barrel would not help, including the international politics of the Middle East and of Russia. There are lots of other ways of achieving a similar result, including an emissions performance standard, so, from these Benches, we give a lukewarm welcome—a lukewarm front, we might say—for the modest step forward contained in the Bill.