Great British Energy Bill

Lord Duncan of Springbank Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Duncan of Springbank (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege and a pleasure to follow the powerful words of the noble Lord, Lord Alton. I declare my interest in both decentralised and nuclear energy.

When I first picked up the Bill, I was surprised at how slight it appeared to be. As I have listened to the debate, I was reminded of some remarks from “Blackadder”. Noble Lords might recall the episode in question, when Blackadder decided that he was going to become an explorer. Lord Melchett says to him:

“The foremost cartographers of the land have prepared this for you; it’s a map of the area that you'll be traversing”—


and he hands him a blank sheet of paper—

“They’ll be very grateful if you could just fill it in as you go along”.

I get the impression that much of the serious work of the Bill will be filled in later, and that in itself is a principal challenge.

The noble Lord, Lord Howell, raised some very interesting points about where we currently stand and the importance of honesty. Our challenge as a nation right now is that many people in the land believe that we are close to achieving many of our aims in decarbonising our electricity, and they are wrong. However, they believe that because quite often they are misled by well-intentioned individuals.

The challenge remains very simple. When I last checked the current electricity generation and its sources today at 5 pm, over half was generated by gas. Renewables accounted for less than 10%. That is an extraordinary gulf that we will have to bridge in very short order. Tellingly, much of our resilience comes not domestically but from our interconnectivity to the continent. Since we have these periods of great calm which affect not just the United Kingdom but this part of Europe more broadly—the North Sea itself and the basin—we cannot always rely upon securing electricity generated by renewables from across the sea either.

I have great hopes for Great British Energy because I think it has the opportunity to address some of the more fundamental issues. If I am being frank, I am a little disappointed that nuclear does not play a greater role in that. I understand the shortcomings of some of the large-scale nuclear, but small modular reactors really have a part to play. Given that baseload will become absolutely critical as we become more reliant upon renewables, we need to be able to ensure that when the lights drop, we can get them back on.

The other revealing element from the data about generation today was that only 3.2% is from storage. This is a key element missing from Great British Energy. We need to up our storage capacity. When I was a Member of the European Parliament, I campaigned strongly to ensure that we did just that, and the European Union continued to turn its back on it.

I hope that in the unfolding of this piece of legislation, we will see an opportunity for storage to have a much more significant part to play because, truthfully, renewables are by their nature intermittent. If we have a wide enough array of them, we might be able to draw upon that; if we have interconnectors, they might be able to help us. But if we cannot store it, we are simply going to be reliant upon good luck at particular points. Sadly, as we enter into winter periods, when we simply do not have the certainty within the renewable sector, we really have a problem. I hope the Minister will have something to say about that; namely, how we might up our renewables storage.

I am also struck as I think about this in terms of the honesty I touched on at the beginning. I understand why the party now in government chose to say that bills would be reduced by £300, because in elections you do not say that bills will go up—you say they will go down. That is a natural part of winning a campaign. The key thing, however, will be to live up to that.

I am not expecting the Minister to confirm that £300 figure today, but it is important that people confronted with ever-increasing bills can plan with certainty and affordability to ensure that they can stay warm during the challenging winter months. That will be a critical aspect of the confidence that will be necessary for Great British Energy to move from being—as it is at the moment—quite a short Bill, to a flourishing opportunity for investment in the key elements we require to move ourselves towards a net-zero future.

I take on board the points made by others—that we alone cannot do that. We are generating and are responsible for a very modest amount of carbon. However, our leadership in this area—which the Bill can offer some of—could well be powerful. It can then begin to demonstrate how we as a nation can decouple our economy and our electricity from our carbon generation. If we can get that right, we have a message to sell to those who can follow in our pathway. Equally, as we link this to other aspects of funding on a global basis, we can then help fund others to join us on that journey.

It will not be easy; it will be costly. Again, this goes back to honesty. No one is going to be better off because of this. This will involve a significant contribution of funds, and the Government must be frank about that. However, if we get it right, get focused and are careful, and if we recognise, as I have said already, the importance of small modular reactors and the necessity of storage—which I will come back to at the later stages of the Bill, and I hope to meet the Minister for a brief chat about some of these things—I think this has the opportunity to deliver.