Energy Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Turner of Ecchinswell

Wednesday 11th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Turner of Ecchinswell (CB)]

My Lords, I speak in favour of the amendment. I find it difficult to understand, for anybody who concentrates not on tactical issues such as the speed of passing of the legislation but simply on the wording, what their opposition in principle could be. The simple fact of the case is that Parliament several years ago passed an Act of Parliament by huge majorities, committing us to the very significant decarbonisation of our economy: an 80% reduction in CO₂ emissions by 2050. It is the clear conclusion of all analysis, including that of the Committee on Climate Change that I used to chair, that there is no believable path to that emissions reduction by 2050 which does not involve the very significant—almost total—decarbonisation of electricity in particular by around 2030.

Clearly that is completely incompatible with a role for coal other than as providing a small number of hours a year of peaking capacity into the mid or late 2020s. This amendment would simply ensure that that possibility would clearly be excluded—with, however, a get-out under Section 48 if that at all endangered an adequacy of supply. It simply seeks to ensure that we will not have unabated coal in significant quantities in the late 2020s, and it does so 12 years ahead, in order to influence the decisions on investment that are required for security of supply.

I fail to see what the disadvantages of the amendment are. It would give greater clarity over our plans for coal and over the opportunities for gas, and I therefore support the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, in his amendment.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I am prompted to rise because of the rather unwarranted attack that the noble Viscount made on Ministers. None of us takes responsibility for security of supply in the future. The late Baroness Thatcher used to say that the only thing that was certain in politics was uncertainty. None of us knows what the future holds or what the likely position will be in 12 years’ time. This amendment would remove the flexibility that a future Government would have in order to keep the lights on. It is really quite wrong of the noble Viscount to present this as some kind of political matter that is exercising Back-Benchers in the other place, as he did, with Ministers responding to that rather than to their responsibility to ensure that we have security of supply. I notice that when I asked the noble Baroness on the Opposition Front Bench about security of supply, she did not deal with the issue.

At the end of Question Time, we had a Question about China. We are now importing vast quantities of carbon from China because of the expansion of coal-fired power stations there, and exporting jobs that would otherwise have been here. To present this as some kind of neutral political argument—