Energy Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Dixon-Smith and Baroness Maddock
Baroness Maddock
My Lords, I support my noble friend. Some years ago in Southampton we had a geothermal bore which contributed—it is not as hot as we would like—to the district heating scheme. It has been very successful. During the Recess I was in New Zealand. A great part of its energy mix is from geothermal. I suggest that noble Lords look at how it has been dealt with there as a good example of how to use geothermal energy.
Lord Dixon-Smith
I hesitate to speak at this hour, but since we are considering geothermal power, perhaps I may introduce a thought about indirect geothermal power. Such power is waste heat from power stations, which consume enormous amounts of raw energy and turn out enormous amounts of waste heat. Generally speaking, it is completely unused. It is an enormous financial handicap and an enormous energy inefficiency which our whole electricity generating industry has to bear and which, as customers, we all pay for.
While I am all in favour of looking for all geothermal sources of energy, we have these indirect geothermal sources of energy already available to us on the surface but we do nothing about them. It is legitimate to raise the subject in this rather indirect way even at this hour of the night. The same applies to nuclear power stations. One can argue that nuclear power is an indirect form of solar power. That is exactly what it is—solar power is nuclear power but happens to be 95 million miles away, and we enjoy it enormously as a result. If it was much closer, we would not. But we have these other sources of energy, which are indirectly the same source of energy as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, was talking about. If we are looking at one of them as something that we should use, we really should look at the other.