I thank the noble Baroness for her expert comments on this amendment. I admit I am perplexed by my noble friend’s response and I will go through it in a very moderate way. All this amendment would do is to put everything back to where the Government actually want it to be, where the large combustion plant directive, conveniently, gradually but fairly imminently shuts down unabated coal. It seems that that has always been a Government assumption. However, because of the high price of gas to coal, suddenly being compliant with that directive becomes economic and so we have a different situation. All this is doing is putting it back to where we thought it was, probably when this Energy Bill started out in its long course through the department and stages of consultation and into Parliament.
It also seems to me that ironically, in this area, it is a win for the Treasury and a win for DECC. From the Treasury’s point of view, if there is certainty about coal going out, there is much more certainty for gas investors coming in—far more than probably a 2044 guarantee on investment. From a DECC point of view, we are actually making sure that those high carbon emissions that come out of old coal and that we were not expecting at least fall out of the system pretty quickly. Therefore, we have a win for all those sides as well as for climate change and we get back to what the Government’s policy originally seemed to be.
As the noble Baroness mentioned, we have the added benefit that in terms of energy security, because of the way that the EPS works, these plants can still be available over short periods of time, but not base load, to meet potential blackouts or brownouts within the electricity markets. So we have a win there as well. While I understand my noble friend’s arguments, I just think that they do not actually reflect government policy—not Treasury policy, DECC policy or the coalition agreement policy. Somehow we need to get out of that. However I am very keen to continue discussions, particularly in this area. In the mean time, in anticipation of that, I withdraw my amendment.