My Lords, I support Amendments 18 and 19 from the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, but I will mainly address my remarks to Amendment 20. I declare my interests as detailed in the register, which include not just coal, but also wood, which I shall criticise. The purpose of Amendment 20 is simple and I hope helpful to the Minister. It is to check that we do not buy the wrong technologies. The only reason for investing in wind is to cut carbon emissions. After last week’s strike price announcement, it cannot be to cut electricity bills. If one were to assume that every megawatt hour from wind displaces one from coal, the cost of carbon reduction from wind will still be exceedingly high—well over £100 a tonne.
However, can we even make this assumption? There is now good evidence from other parts of the world that wind does not achieve anything close to the emissions cuts assumed by the Government. National Grid recently announced that wind power had saved
11 million tonnes of CO2 emissions here over 18 months and little back-up fossil fuel was burned to compensate for the intermittency of wind. Even if this were true, it is just 1.5% of our emissions, but it is a most misleading calculation. It assumes that the only fossil fuel needed to back up wind was that needed to compensate for the discrepancy between forecast wind speed and actual wind speed. That is only half the story.
For a more realistic result we must take into account studies in Colorado, Texas, Illinois, Holland and Australia, all of which show far smaller CO2 savings than expected. More recently, I understand that another study soon to be published, from Ireland, finds that the actual savings of CO2 due to wind turbines are less than half of those assumed by the National Grid, DECC and others. The intermittency of wind results in more start-ups and shut-downs of gas plants, which uses fuel less efficiently and so produces more CO2. This problem is bound to get worse in the future because, as wind capacity increases, it has to be backed up by plants that are less good at starting up and shutting down.
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Eventually, we will replace our current surplus of ageing combined-cycle gas turbines with new gas turbines under the capacity market mechanism. We know from Ireland and elsewhere that the new plants are likely to be single-cycle gas plants, which operate at much lower thermal efficiency and are designed for meeting fluctuations in demand. This means not only that any tonne of carbon dioxide saved by wind is likely to cost us £200 onshore or £300 offshore, but that there is grave doubt that wind power can achieve the carbon savings expected of it to get close to the 150 grams or 100 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour target. As Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University put it:
“The key problems with current policies for wind power are simple. They require a huge commitment of investment resources to a technology that is not very green, in the sense of saving a lot of CEO2, but which is certainly very expensive and inflexible”.
Should we not at least find out if such studies are right? If they are wrong, there is nothing to fear from a review. If they are right, we are whistling in the wind. As the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, put it, we are doing this in the hope that other countries will follow suit. It is far from clear that rich countries can afford £300 per tonne of carbon without a significant decline in living standards, let alone poor countries.
On the subject of biomass, the Minister drew my attention to sewage and landfill gas, but these are very small beer compared with the amount of wood we are burning, let alone planning to burn. Others argue that the forests being harvested are commercial plantations being cut for timber that will be used in manufacture. However, there is the rub. All over Europe and America, the makers of chipboard and timber are losing market share to newly subsidised biomass buyers. This carbon was destined to be locked up in houses and pallets. Now it is being burned instead.
It is argued that because trees regrow to replace those that are cut down, carbon dioxide is eventually turned back into carbohydrate. However, this takes decades. In anything less than 50—perhaps 100—years,
we will be raising carbon emissions by burning wood. We keep being told that the problem is urgent. Therefore, something that comes good in 100 years is not a very good idea.
On infrared photons, a carbon dioxide molecule is a carbon dioxide molecule, wherever it came from. Most of the heat energy in wood is in its carbon, not in its hydrogen. That is why you can turn it into charcoal without cutting its thermal capacity much, but greatly reducing its weight. You are effectively driving off its hydrogen and oxygen as water. This is quite different from any need to dry the wood first. That is another problem. Therefore, biomass plants operate at 25% thermal efficiency, compared to 35% to 40% for coal. I stick to the argument that to burn wood is to generate more carbon emissions even than coal, and certainly more than gas.
If my noble friend thinks that either my chemistry or my logic is wrong, she has nothing to fear from commissioning a study of the kind that my amendment suggests. It would be cheap, and it could be very quick.