My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for presenting this order and for the comments from the right reverend Prelate. This is a very good example of a difficult balancing act; clearly, having intervened in the market to take on important decisions about where we put money, which technology to support, how much it should cost and at what volumes, it is challenging.
However, it is true in all of this that we have to think about investor confidence. Just today an article appeared in the Telegraph saying that a lack of clarity over UK energy policy is forcing the UK’s ranking in the green power league down; we are now at number eight, having dropped a place. Also, if you look at where we are in the ranking of renewable energy deployment in the EU, we are almost in the relegation zone, at the bottom of that league table when you look at energy across the piece, with a very modest deployment of renewable energy into all primary energy, with only the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Malta below us in that table in the EU.
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Clearly, we cannot afford to throttle back completely on any success story. Although it is true that solar has a limited availability in winter peak moments, it is also true that the costs are coming down and that, in terms of least-cost decarbonisation, solar is potentially an important component of what we need to deploy to hit our targets.
The Minister has already referred to one of my questions—namely, that there is a fear that we will have a boom in investment and in applications, and that this will cause a repeat of what happened with the feed-in tariff. I think it is fair to say that the feed-in tariff process was pretty badly handled. My bigger question here is: what mechanisms are the Government using to track these potential bubbles? How can we signal in advance—as we do with the RHI, although I am no fan of it—a steadier approach to how the levy control framework funds will be deployed? It is not easy, and I do not think that there is a silver bullet or an answer to this. The long-term goal has to be to try to get this back more into the market so that we have to do less of this administrative handling. We understand the reasoning but we need to think again about how we are going to manage this because I suspect that we will come back to it again and again.