I rise to support the Minister in his disagreeing with Lords amendment 105. This country has always had a balanced energy policy, with several things feeding into the mix, and I think it important that we continue that. The problem is, however, that we have not built enough capacity over the past 15 or 20 years. The changes under the Thatcher Government to the grid and the electricity market were successful in maintaining relatively low prices, but there has not been the same investment in capacity. That was made substantially worse by the last Government, who managed to produce a White Paper without mentioning nuclear power as part of that important mix.
We now face a difficulty. At some point, we have to close the Magnox stations. In addition, we have policies that are making coal less attractive, so that capacity is going off and needs to be replaced. Although there are plans and many firms are talking about building capacity, it is not being built. If we are not careful, we will have a gap, in that we will lose capacity and then have to either import or face the genuine risk that the lights will go out some time in the next several years. That is a serious thing. We can have all sorts of debates in this Chamber about the economy, quantitative easing, funding for lending and everything else, but if we cannot generate enough electricity to keep the lights on and industry running, that will be a poor indictment of the British economy.
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I do not think Members understand how difficult and critical this will be. We really need to get on with investment. I hope that we can start Hinkley C as soon as possible and that we will have other nuclear power stations. I hope, too, that we will build some cleaner coal stations, and there are many proposals for added gas capacity in future. However, making amendments that make our current coal-fired stations less attractive does not seem a sensible thing to do. We need to sweat our assets and keeping them going until we are sure that the cleaner forms of electricity, such as nuclear and others, can provide for the British economy.
I am an optimist when it comes to the British economy. I think that it could grow quite rapidly over the next 10 to 15 years, and if it does, power demand will go up and we will need to provide for that. It seems slightly bonkers that we should be arguing a little bit on the head of a pin about a few stations when, as has come out in this debate, the Germans have decided to abandon nuclear—that is their decision—but are building quite a lot of coal-powered stations. The good news for the Germans is that they can abandon nuclear if they are building an alternative source of electricity. We seem to
be talking a lot about providing alternative sources of electricity, but still grinding some of the existing capacity down.
We therefore risk having a generating capacity gap. John F. Kennedy talked about a missile gap, but we will have a generating capacity gap. Unless we take great care to ensure that we maintain as much capacity as we can for the foreseeable future, while encouraging people through our policies and what we are doing in the Bill to invest substantial sums in future capacity, we will have a problem.