Renewable Energy: Costs

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and to agree with him particularly on the last point that he made. There are difficult decisions to be made; we need transparency and we need critical analysis of individual projects and policy decisions that will influence how we go forward. But we had the advantage in this country, and it is one reason why we became such a leader, of basing those decisions on a fundamental agreement across parties of the huge significance of the issues relating to climate change and the opportunities that there were both to save the world—that sounds very dramatic, but it is not necessarily incorrect—and to hold back and stem the potentially disastrous consequences of global warming by taking action now.

I am getting ahead of my speech and I have not declared my interest, which I do now. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Frost, on again directing the House’s attention to these issues. However, I fear that today he has asked us to take a very narrow focus on the cost of renewable energy and the effect on energy costs in the UK. I do not dispute that these are important issues, but I will not spend my precious four minutes going into the arcane debate about the latest LCOE figures from DESNZ or the implications of the latest strike price from AR6 CfD.

I simply say to the noble Lord that he puts a very gloomy interpretation on these figures, and he says that they are disputed. I do not dispute that he disputes them. However, there is a weight of opinion—academic, scientific and international—that suggests that his interpretation is wrong. If we look at the latest reports of the NESO, which he referred to, the CCC, the IEA and the International Renewable Energy Agency, and the excellent briefings we got from the Grantham Institute, the ECIU and the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association, they do not take the same view of the costs as he does.

My fear is not only that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has got his sums wrong—and possibly, some would say, not for the first time—but that we focus only on the narrow issue of the debate today. We run the risk, as Oscar Wilde told us, of seeing

“the price of everything and the value of nothing”.

There is value in the transition to renewables, beyond the savings to consumers, which I believe are there. There is value in terms of energy security, sustainable jobs for the future, this country’s economic performance and our ability to lead in this area in the future. I hope that other noble Lords will go into more detail about that value later in this debate.