Infrastructure Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Cameron of Dillington and Lord Jenkin of Roding
Lord Cameron of Dillington
I oppose these amendments. There are dangers involved. I believe in community involvement in local energy schemes whether voluntary or, if need be, statutory, and on the whole this clause is a good proposal. As I said at Second Reading, financial involvement means that the local community does not get in knee-jerk opposition to a scheme, which is good. However, I have chaired or been on the board of several unquoted companies, and I am very much aware of the power that shareholders owning as little as 10% of the equity can have. They would probably rightly be able to claim a place on the board and by judicious use of their block of shares they can have, if so minded, a fairly negative effect on the progress of the company in question. I have experienced an instance of this where a minority shareholder on the board had an agenda different from that of the rest of the board. It is very difficult to drive forward a company under those circumstances. The shareholder can look for opportunities to block and do deals with other shareholders in a negative way.
We are trying to encourage these energy projects to get off the ground and overcome all the obstacles. Those obstacles are not only planners but energy companies, connection problems, landowner problems and certainly community problems. They all have to be focused upon. If the business involved does not remain totally focused on driving the project and overcoming all these obstacles, it can easily falter and the project will get delayed or, worse still, fold altogether. If a group could compulsorily buy in to 10% or, worse still, 20% of a local energy project, that would easily open the door to spoiling tactics by antis, whether they are anti-fracking, anti-wind, anti-PV or just BANANAs —BANANA, as your Lordships will know, stands for “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything”. In my view, 5% would be a safe upper limit for community involvement, particularly if it is compulsory, 10% would be risky and 20% would be extremely dangerous for our renewable energy industry.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I promise I am not going to try the patience of the Committee anything like as long as I did a few minutes ago. If one reads the passages in the draft report of the task force, it recommends a number of different methods by which financing could be organised. One is crowdfunding. That might be quite a good way to raise sufficient money to get the community involved. Perhaps it would not be the whole community or the BANANAs that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, referred to, and we are all very familiar with them, but enough people for them to turn around and say “For heaven’s sake, shut up because we want this to go ahead”.
That report is quite interesting because financial circles see some difficulty of the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, has been describing, but this is particularly a case where the widest possible flexibility is needed. We want to see community involvement in infrastructure schemes of this sort, but we should not attempt to prescribe how that should happen. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, clearly indicated that raising the percentage might offer considerable difficulties. It should be entirely free for a local community or investor to decide how it should be done. That can really only be done under a voluntary system.
Energy Bill
Debate between Lord Cameron of Dillington and Lord Jenkin of Roding
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I say this with some hesitation and with great respect to the noble Lord who has just spoken. It is not right to say that there is no place in the world where CCS is working. A couple of years ago, some of us paid a visit to the BP research centre at Sunbury, where we were given a very interesting demonstration of their plant in Algeria. BP is extracting gas from very widespread gas deposits, stretching over perhaps 20 to 25 miles in various pockets. There is a substantial refining operation that includes CCS, and the resultant CO2 that is extracted is then pumped straight back into the gas reservoirs from which the gas has been extracted. The gas supplied for the market is then piped to the coast and goes across the Mediterranean. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, will perhaps be able to explain his gestures. It is a single plant, I accept that, but it has been made to work and it is economic for the company that operates that gas field in Algeria.
BP also made the point that there are CCS plants in the Far East. One does not know what the circumstances are, commercial or otherwise, but there is a lot of work going on internationally on this. I started by being sceptical about the Government’s competition and the £1 billion that they have put up. I have become persuaded that, although it has taken an incredibly long time to get underway, they now have two very firm takers that are going to develop CCS. I think therefore that the noble Lord’s guess of 15 years may be unduly pessimistic.
I absolutely agree with my noble friend Lord Deben that CCS must be an essential part of our armoury if we are going to get anywhere near our 2050 target. Anything that can encourage this must be right, and for that reason I, too, support this amendment.
Lord Cameron of Dillington
My Lords, I support the amendment. CCS is very important. While most of us here—I am happy to note that there have been some notable exceptions in previous Committee sessions—are in favour of decarbonisation and the UK becoming a leader of the world in renewable energy, I think we would all hope that we can become leaders in the world in CCS because, frankly, there are huge economic possibilities if we can pull it off. China is a very good example; contrary to the often-put theories of the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, China is deeply concerned about climate change. The Chinese actually produce a new nuclear power station every week but still have more energy produced by wind than nuclear energy, and they are concerned.