My Lords, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will look at these amendments as probing amendments, because there are some important issues which we need to cover. I declare a past interest in the sense that I was involved in trying to get a particular interconnection. My experience from that is that there are many difficulties which are not systemic difficulties, as the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, might refer to them, but simply difficulties about the way in which we do things in this country which makes it very complex.
There are two different issues here which are covered in the first of the amendments, which was introduced earlier by my noble friend Lady Parminter. One is connection and the other is connection,
“in order to support the continued development of a European internal electricity market”.
Those are two different things, although I hope that they would run in parallel. Manifestly, in the long-distant future, it would be quite sensible to have a lot of windmills when there was wind and a lot of solar when there was sun. Being able to pass that along would be very good. Modern methods of transmission
are very much less wasteful than previously and there is some indication that we will be able to move things very well in the future.
Obviously, therefore, there is a long-term interest in linking up the systems more effectively. I do not know what the latest figure is, but it has been estimated that if we made certain, not-very-difficult changes to the northern European connections, we could save about 11% of our emissions, simply because they are now wasted due to the connecting arrangement. That may have been updated now, but there are clearly savings to be made there. They are the sort of savings that we should make before we do other things. It always seems to me that wastage—I am glad that right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester came into this debate—is the least acceptable manner of putting emissions into the atmosphere. It just does not seem to be a right thing to do.
Even if it were not for that reason, we need to open up the opportunities for people to invest. The noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, is right that such investments are quite expensive, but if you open up the opportunities for people to invest, the market will sort out which investments are sensible and which are not. There will be an opportunity then for perhaps rather more cost-effective investment, which would involve interconnection.
The purpose of the amendments, so far as I can see, is to ask my noble friend the Minister, “Are we sure that we’ve looked at this sufficiently well in the general panoply?”. The climate change committee, of which I have the honour to be the chairman, has always talked about a portfolio of energy supplies as being the basis for energy sovereignty, for making sure that we do not become subject to very high prices of gas and for making sure that we fight against dangerous climate change—these three things come together. The portfolio approach is the one that I am always looking at. I am very keen that we should not write this Bill to exclude this. The noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, would probably go along with the concept that we should make sure that there is not an opportunity here. I am not sure that the Bill does that. If my noble friend could say to the Committee that she will make sure there is not a lacuna here, it would be a very helpful outcome of this debate.