Infrastructure Bill [HL]
Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Bishop of Chester(9 years, 6 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, can I ask the Minister when she responds to comment on two points? First, if we are now to be committed in this legally strengthened way to the maximum economic exploration of our oil and gas reserves, how do the Government see that to be compatible with the commitment under the Climate Change Act to reduce our emissions to only 20% of the 1990 level by 2050 without also having a strategy for carbon capture and storage, which I think lies behind the amendment?
Secondly, the amendment refers to the economic extraction of our hydrocarbons—I have never yet heard any reliable estimate of what the additional cost will be of having carbon capture and storage on a typical power station, be it a coal station or a gas station. What level of increase per kilowatt hour—in a unit that can be easily understood—is anticipated if carbon capture and storage is required on such stations? That impacts on what is economically recoverable.
The Earl of Caithness (Con)
My Lords, I have a question for my noble friend on the Front Bench arising from my work not long ago on carbon capture and storage. It concluded that every situation would be different and that it would depend not only on the oil wells but on the businesses trying to do this work. Some businesses might be able to pool their resources, and while it might be possible to set up a grid in a certain area, it might not be in another. Would not the amendments as proposed make that much more difficult? As my noble friend Lord Jenkin has reminded us, we are at a very early stage in CCS and the technology is not yet fully proven. An awful lot of work still has to be done, so to put something like this on to an industry which is in its infancy will surely cause more problems than it will solve.
Energy Bill
Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Bishop of Chester
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, when I am in a really tedious meeting I sometimes flick to my iPhone if I succumb to the temptation. The Energywatch organisation has a splendid app which tells you exactly what electricity generation is going on at any particular moment. I can tell your Lordships that at this moment we are depending upon supplies from overseas of 7%, or 3 gigawatts. Wind is producing at the moment less than one sixth of that. Over time, I am struck by just what a significant proportion of our electricity already comes in that way. Three gigawatts is not nothing; it is a very significant amount.
When the Minister responds, it would be helpful if she could give some indication as to what security there is. I belong to those who have some anxieties that in three or four years’ time, if economic activity picks up and some outages occur at a couple of big stations that we are not expecting, and if the weather is very cold and the wind is not blowing, we are going to depend upon electricity coming from these interconnectors. We can depend on it only if we know that they will be available. If the weather is also inadvertent in other countries, what security do we have that the electricity will be available from other places? I am entirely with the view that we should have a European electricity market. That is absolutely right but it has to be with certain guarantees for supply in this country, especially when supply gets tight in a few years’ time.
The Earl of Caithness
My Lords, I support in principle what my noble friend Lady Parminter is proposing in this amendment. The evidence that we got in Sub-Committee D was that interconnection throughout Europe needed a great deal more money spent on it, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, has told us. It needs to be improved, but that is a two-way process. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, referred to some of the difficulties and I recall those being adduced to the committee.
My concern with this is therefore: what is the point of the UK producing a strategy when nobody else is producing one? We can produce a strategy and the Government can be questioned in the House about it, but if the French are not altering their system so that we are compatible and one can move the electricity to and fro, or if the problems have not been resolved with Norway—as was highlighted, there was a problem getting a connection with Norway or with the Danes—it seems a little pointless us having a strategy. Surely this ought to be done within the EU context. However, my noble friend Lady Parminter and the noble Lords, Lord Cameron and Lord Whitty, have the advantage that since I have left Sub-Committee D, they interviewed the Secretary of State. Although I have read the transcript, I would hope that they can enlighten us on what the Secretary of State had to say on our report, which we will discuss in more detail on Monday.
In some ways, I support the principle of great interconnection, although there will be problems from time to time. I know that the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan, is more secure about the vote in September next year than I am. I wonder whether there is a way of preventing nuclear energy getting into Scotland because Scotland will not want nuclear energy from England. Can we adapt the grid so that one cannot get nuclear energy; it would only upset the Scots?