My Lords, I shall repeat the statement. Later in my remarks I shall come back and justify it. Climate change is happening more slowly than expected. Far from locking in highly expensive energy, as we are doing, we should be reconsidering the huge cost that we are afflicting the most vulnerable with to comfort the most comfortable. Offshore wind costs about four times as much as gas: £270 per megawatt-hour is the total cost, including connections and system costs, for offshore wind compared with about £66 for gas. We are asking hard-working families to pay over the odds for their electricity in order to provide subsidies to generate power and in order to provide subsidies not to generate power. Last year, £30 million was paid to wind companies not to produce power at a time when it was not needed. Furthermore, we are asking them to pay over the odds to pay for the short-term operating reserve, which is the balancing mechanism by which we make up for the fact that wind is unpredictable. That consists largely of fleets of diesel generators, which are being increased in number by the national grid towards 8 gigawatts, combined with open-cycle gas turbines—both of which are higher carbon than combined-cycle and extremely expensive.
Moreover, we are asking hard-working families to pay over the odds to upgrade the grid and the network costs involved in that, specifically for wind. We are asking them to pay for a carbon floor price, the specific purpose of which is to make fossil fuels look less cheap compared with renewables. Finally, we are asking them to pay over the odds to compensate energy-intensive industries for these costs that we are putting on to them. All of these things end up on people’s bills at the end of the day and they are not paid through general taxation, where the richest could pay more of them: they are paid through people’s electricity bills. Green levies have risen by about tenfold in 10 years, but we ain’t seen nothing yet. By 2020, about £13 billion, if you include system costs and VAT, will be spent every year, compared with about £2.9 billion today, on the support for renewable energy, particularly wind. The biggest part of that will be going to offshore wind. People’s bills will go up as a result of green subsidies by 33% by 2020 and 41% by 2030, according to figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change.