Energy Bill [HL]

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 19th December 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 173, I will also speak to Amendments 174 to 176, 178 to 180 and 182 in the name of the Minister, my noble friend Lord Callanan.

Amendments 173 to 176 provide clarification and consistency to the definitions of the appliances to which the energy smart regulations will apply. These definitions focus on the purpose of an appliance. Amendments 173 and 174 ensure that energy smart regulations can be made only for cleaning appliances that are most appropriate for demand-side flexibility. This includes, for example, a dishwasher or a washing machine. Amendment 175 allows battery storage to be captured in a manner consistent with the definition of electricity storage in Clause 162. Amendments 176 and 182 clarify that the regulations capture heat pumps, which are essential to the Government’s policy objectives for decarbonising heat.

Next, Amendments 178 and 179 indicate that the Secretary of State may make provision about the recall of non-compliant appliances and may issue guidance about the prohibitions and requirements imposed by these regulations. These amendments therefore provide further safeguards to address serious cases of non-compliance and will support industry to comply with its obligations, aided by guidance.

Lastly, Amendment 180 makes a minor amendment to ensure that the regulations cover additional methods other than ordinary selling for making energy smart appliances available to consumers, such as hire purchase agreements.

Energy smart appliances will play an essential part in the transition to a smarter energy system, enabling consumers to save money on bills and contributing to cost-effective decarbonisation. These amendments provide important clarifications on the scope of these regulations and make certain that they can be implemented effectively in a way that maximises the benefits of smart functionality for consumers and the electricity group.

I will respond to the non-government amendments in this group when we have heard noble Lords’ contributions. I beg to move.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My little Amendment 177 seems to have intruded on this group of government amendments. I tabled it because I was concerned about the practical implications of the Government’s reliance on smart regulations and smart appliances. I am certainly not arguing with the technology but I am seeking to tease out exactly how this will impact on us and the people of Britain as ordinary consumers.

If you read Clause 187, you will see that it is very dictatorial and centralised in its approach. Yet if you look at paragraph 438 of the Explanatory Notes you will see that, in practice, the Government’s intentions are going to be carried out by retailers and manufacturers, and they will face penalties if they do not get it right. My concern is that one size does not fit all. For example, the noble Baroness just mentioned washing machines and so on, but my example would be electric vehicles. We are told to charge electric vehicles at times when electricity usage is low, and we are promised that this will become an automatic default position. The Government are relying on smart usage, in effect, to expand limited national grid capacity. At the weekend, when I was reading some background material, I noticed that there are only two regions where there is currently said to be any level of surplus national grid capacity. The rest of the country is in a very stretched position.

I have been asking these questions for some years. I have been asking how a reliance on telling people when they can wash their clothes or charge their cars will impact on consumers and the way we use our gadgets and run our daily lives. There is a current experiment, not using smart technology but with a voluntary agreement, to get people to opt in to using their washing machines, dishwashers and so on at low-demand periods, with a financial incentive to do that. That is great if it is convenient for these people and they are opting in to do it. I am pleased that the experiment is taking place, as I am sure it will produce some useful information, but I want to float past everyone a couple of potential issues.

First, I do not want to bore noble Lords for long with the details of my domestic life but I have solar panels and an electric car. I want to use my washing machine and dishwasher and charge my electric vehicle when the sun is out; sometimes, that is at a time of peak demand. I am saving myself money, which I regard as a good thing, but, more importantly, I am limiting the amount I draw down from the grid because my solar panels provide my electricity. I am minimising my call on the grid. There are lots of people like me with solar panels; let us hope that there are heaps more in the coming months and years. This issue needs to be taken into account.

Secondly, more importantly, there is a host of people whose working patterns require them to charge their cars and do their washing at peak times. A care worker working nights has to fit their domestic life around those daily patterns, which might be peak demand times. This is not just about just care workers; it is about health workers, district nurses or anyone working on shifts—the police, firefighters and taxi drivers. We want taxi drivers to drive electric vehicles but they are going to run out of electricity half way through the day; they must be enabled to carry on their work.

We have all, I am sure, experienced a situation where we have had to take our phone or laptop to the technical experts because it is doing something strange, behaving in a way that is beyond our understanding. We are normally told that it is the factory settings or an automatic download. I am now aware that, because they are so automated, electric vehicles adopt patterns that one might not necessarily understand fully because they have downloaded a new program and so on. As the technology becomes more sophisticated, in reality, consumers will find it more difficult to understand what it is doing, why and to override it when they need to.

My big question is that any reliance on smart charging and smart usage must be able to be adapted for that large body of people for whom it is not convenient. In days of high energy prices, most of us can probably be relied on to know what is best for us financially and, therefore, what draws least from the grid. I am concerned that the way in which this is expressed allows no latitude, judgment or option for consumers to make that decision for themselves.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 181 in my name, which follows on from what my noble friend Lady Randerson was talking about.

The whole area of smart appliances is really important. It is in fact where demand management starts to creep into this Bill; it is about the only place that it does. The popularity of their potential has, I think, been shown by National Grid’s call for people to offer to manage their energy usage over particular times in the winter; the Minister may give us the figures but I think that more than a million people have shown an interest in it. I would be interested to know where we are with that.

There is a risk here, however. We have seen it with smart meters. I will not go back to the smart meters argument but one barrier to rollout has been the fear of people sharing information. Clearly, data is core to smart technology; data is personal so there is the question of how that data will be used.

My Amendment 181 is really a probing amendment; it is not in the form that would finally go into a Bill. It seeks to understand how the Government are going to communicate what is a really important thrust in terms of demand management and the way we use dispersed energy systems in a smart grid. How are they going to explain and deliver the strategy outlined so that we do not have the consumer reaction that we have had in other areas, including smart meters—very much media-driven, I should add? I want to avoid that.

The other area on which I want to tackle the Minister is concerns Clause 187(3)(d). It is one sub-paragraph of just three lines about security of information—indeed, the whole area of security. This is a core, important area: we know that, wherever smart systems or information technology are involved, there are all sorts of threats regarding the use of personal information. There is also the threat of external hacking, with state actors or others going into these systems and making them unusable.

It is easy and right to say that personal and other data used with smart technologies are secure or otherwise protected, but who is actually going to do that? I am talking about security or communication software systems. I would like to know from the Minister who will be responsible for the protection and security of these systems. I believe that it is important from the bottom up in terms of personal information but also in terms of smart grids and external, less favourable people towards the United Kingdom intervening here. I am sure that the Government have this under control and consideration but it is a really important area. We need to understand that it is being taken seriously and that, whoever the person or authority, they are going to make sure that these particular three lines in Clause 187(3)(d) are delivered.