I would like to ask those who tabled this amendment about the sources of energy that we will be interconnecting with. At present, within Germany, we will have a highly distorted market, with renewables concentrated in the north, demand in the south, and nuclear power stations closing by 2021.
As I understand it, Germany’s nuclear power stations enabled the Danes to keep nice and green by exporting some of its surplus nuclear supply to them. At this stage, we can probably discount Denmark and Germany as potential sources of supply. We have been fortunate to have had an interconnection arrangement with France. In some respects, it has probably done the French more good than us, certainly commercially, but it has enabled us to keep our lights on. On the other hand, one can imagine that the parlous state of not only the Italian economy but that country’s interconnection may present problems. In this little European tour, it is most unlikely that we could depend on Italy as a source of much energy for the United Kingdom. It would be very nice to have connections with Iceland but its significance would be pretty limited.
There is always the issue that long undersea cables have significant transmission losses, and I am not quite sure how much we would get out of Ireland on a good day. We know that there may be gas around
Ireland and there have been useful discoveries there. However, the point that I am trying to make is that we could conceivably get some hydro power from Norway but my understanding is that global warming there has created problems whereby hydro power is not quite as reliable as it used to be because the glaciers are getting smaller and there is too much water at the wrong times.
It would be nice to be reassured that someone in Europe at the other end of our interconnections could provide us with a lot of electricity. If we were to obtain 30 gigawatts of nuclear power, we might be able to sell some to Ireland, although the Irish might not like nuclear power. They do not seem to mind it when it comes from Scotland, so long as it is under an agreement with a company that also owns gas-fired and coal-fired power stations. Like the Danes, the Irish are able to remain rather more environmentally acceptable to other people than perhaps they are.
The point that I am really trying to get at is that this will be very expensive, there will be transmission losses because of the distances involved and I am not sure which countries will have surplus capacity capable of providing us with what might well turn out to be extremely expensive electricity. At the moment, it has been useful and helpful to have received it from France. I am pretty certain that the French will sell it to the highest bidder and there will be people on the continent of Europe who will probably need imported electricity to a far greater extent than we do and will therefore probably be desperate enough to pay higher prices for it. Before we embark on a strategy that implies great expense and investment, given the parlous state of a lot of the energy companies in terms of even their share value, increased interconnection is a wee bit fanciful. I am happy to be convinced if there are power generators across the North Sea desperate to sell to us but I am not quite sure that they are. Even if they are keen now, will they be in 10 years’ time? Although we are having administrative difficulties in getting this Bill into a shape that we can deal with on Report, we will probably eventually get it right, but we do not get the impression that our European partners are moving with even the glacial speed at which we are travelling when trying to achieve solutions. A strategy might be very nice but, at the end of the day, it might be wishful thinking.
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