I am grateful for that intervention. I anticipated that the hon. Gentleman would refer to this point, because we had a rehearsal in a Westminster Hall
debate this morning. I have also read the report compiled for the Department of Energy and Climate Change on coal-fired power stations in Germany that he had in the Library yesterday. He will know from the report that the plants were sanctioned in 2007-08, which was pre-EU 2020 targets, pre-withdrawal of free allowances and pre-renewables. The trigger for German investment in coal was the first nuclear phase out, and the slow build of the plants commissioned in 2007-08 were the result of a number of plants using defective steel. They are likely to operate at a loss. They are completing commissioning to make less of a loss than if they had been abandoned—that is the reality.
I accept the hon. Gentleman’s general point about Germany. There is a danger that we almost fetishise the German experience. [Interruption.] I think I have made the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, the right hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) laugh, but I did not mean fetishisation in any unclean sense. The deployment of renewables in Germany has been significant and has expanded, with more community and diverse ownership of capacity. We can learn a lot from that, but, as a German academic expressed it to me this week, with the amount of coal-fired power currently being generated in Germany, one might think that the people who hold up Germany as the green case for the future cannot read statistics. The German view of CCS has been born of opposition to storing carbon underground, and the UK is more likely to store carbon under the sea. The German decision to accelerate the phase out of nuclear was perhaps not the wisest, given the emissions targets that it too has to meet.