Energy Bill
Debate between Lord Dixon-Smith and Viscount Ridley
Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, I hesitate to intervene in a debate between titans but I wish to speak as an innocent customer. I have been paying my fuel bills for my business for three months short of 55 years and have seen the price go up 6,000% in that time. If I have seen the price rise like that, so has the community. The first tribute I must pay is to the community at large for its enormous adaptability over very difficult and rapidly changing times.
I come back to the amendment we are discussing. I was delighted to listen to my noble friend Lord Jenkin, who for once was on the same side of the fence as me, because I do not think that the amendment is appropriate, but perhaps for slightly different reasons than have been mentioned. I wholly support the target in the Climate Change Act. We already have a basket of technologies which, if put in place, would enable us to hit that target. Perhaps the necessary initiative and determination on the part of some of the participants in the debate are not there but the technologies already exist. What I do not know, of course, is what the unknown unknowns are, to borrow a phrase from a rather notable American.
I want to talk about a known unknown which has changed the nature of the game since the Climate Change Act was passed, and that, of course, is shale gas. I am well aware that shale gas emits carbon dioxide if you use it to generate electricity, but one of the things that has been going on in the background in this country for a very long time is consideration of the use of carbon capture and storage with the intention, if possible, of trying to keep the coal business in being. However, the fact of the matter is that the emissions from a coal-fired power station are so appalling that the cost of CCS is extremely high, the energy penalty is also extremely high and it is not going to work. The cost of cleaning up the emissions from a gas-fired turbine, however, is much less because the emissions themselves are cleaner, the cost of emissions per unit of electricity is already that much cheaper and you can get those emissions down virtually to zero. Therefore, if we had those supplies—that is the big question to which we do not know the answer—we would have what I choose to call a very useful potential interim technology. I put it no higher than that. Setting short-term targets now could lead us into a situation whereby we are forced to invest in high-cost technologies in order to meet these short-term targets. I do not think that is wise.
We are not dealing just with investor confidence here. It strikes me that the energy suppliers are playing a very good game of poker with us at the moment, which I think we should resist. We also have to deal with customer confidence. The difficulty we have with the whole question of shale gas is that we do not know yet whether we have it, can extract it and use it. To force a decision on the assumption that it is not there, because that is where we started the debate, would be totally wrong. We should not rule out possibilities. Another reason why I am against short-term targets is that we also have to face the possibility that there may be other game-changers out there that we do not know about. We shall have to be able to take them into account as we go along, so my personal prejudice is for keeping things as uncontrolled as possible for as long as possible, bearing in mind the absolute necessity of meeting the target in the Climate Change Act, which, as I say, is capable of being met if we have the political determination to do it.
I am sorry to say to my good friend Lord Oxburgh, because he is my good friend, that the amendment is one step too far or one step too soon—you can take your choice.
Viscount Ridley
My Lords, I, too, rise to oppose the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh—although I greatly appreciate some of the points that he has made—and, to some extent, to echo what the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, said. We have heard a lot about the importance of jobs, prosperity and giving certainty to companies—usually ones with Japanese and Scandinavian names, I notice. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, I would say that we do not build power stations for the people who work in them and run them, we build them for the people who use the electricity that comes from them.
Last week, we heard that the Government have decided on a strike price for offshore wind of £155 per megawatt hour. A few years ago, the Government said they had the ambition of getting this down to £100 per megawatt hour. That now seems to have been abandoned, as the number has come down, with inflation taken into account, to only £135 in 2015, I think it is. These are extremely high numbers—three times the going rate for energy at the moment. What will happen to the people in the chemical, cement, steel, aluminium and heavy engineering industries? We know the answer to that. There is an industrial renaissance going on in the United States—a huge resurgence of manufacturing industry—because of shale gas and the effect it has had on energy prices.