Green Economy

Debate between Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park and Kelvin Hopkins

Thursday 28th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

I defer to the previous two speakers on their knowledge of energy matters, but I have some points I wish to make. I was interested in the suggestion from my near neighbour, the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), who seems to be strongly in favour of getting rid of the EU’s restrictions on state aids. I completely agree. I am completely in favour of state aids, where appropriate, and we should not be constrained from applying them by the EU—but then my Eurosceptic views are, I think, fairly well known. My hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) made a thorough, erudite speech that I will read in detail with interest later.

My concern is about energy conservation. Massive investment in energy conservation has everything to commend itself, while investment in nuclear generation has nothing to commend itself. With energy conservation, every home, office, public building and factory in the country can save enormous amounts of energy, so rather than generating energy, we need to conserve it. It is cheaper, too, particularly for the less-well-off living in constituencies such as mine, where some people still do not have roof insulation—aerial photographs at night show the infrared glow from those homes. These are poor people who cannot afford to invest, so it is something that the Government have to attend to.

Investment in energy efficiency would be enormously cheaper than focusing simply on generation. The Association for the Conservation of Energy has produced a report in the past few months demonstrating that such investment would be as much as £1 trillion cheaper over time than investment in generation and would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Many of those jobs, in home insulation, would not be high skilled, so a lot of unemployed people, particularly young people, in my constituency who do not have high skills would be ideally suited to working in the sector. We desperately need these sorts of jobs at every level.

Energy conservation would be labour-intensive, rather than capital-intensive, which is what nuclear investment is about. I have been informed this week that officials in the Department of Energy and Climate Change are doing a deal that will be massively beneficial to EDF. All the other energy companies have dropped out of the nuclear programme in Britain, leaving EDF the monopoly supplier. It is effectively owned by the French Government—they own 85%—and our DECC officials are so obsessively pro-nuclear that they are going to strike a deal that will effectively subsidise EDF to the tune of £5 billion. That money will go to EDF, a French company, and will be used to benefit French taxpayers, French consumers and, no doubt, the French nuclear industry as well. It will not benefit us at all. That £5 billion could be spent in many other ways, particularly on energy conservation.

The right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden is right that we need a base provision of core generation for peak times, but if we invest heavily in green energy of every kind in order to maximise energy provision in other ways, we could reduce that core requirement to its very lowest level. Germany has already done it. I understand that it has invested gigantic amounts in all sorts of alternative energy, such that, on warm summer weekend days, they can effectively shut down their power stations and tick over on the alternative energy provision.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about energy efficiency and nuclear power. I echo everything he has said. Will he join me in urging the Government to put more emphasis on energy efficiency in the proposed electricity market reforms, the original intention of which was to introduce the concept of “negawatts”, which would put energy saved on a par with energy generated and therefore revolutionise the energy market and fundamentally change the dynamic?

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his informed intervention. The problem is that the energy companies have been far too influential in DECC and have been able to bend the arms of even our Secretaries of State, because the central core of government decided years ago that it wanted to keep the companies and nuclear power on side. Those companies make money out of selling energy, not conservation or solar power at a local level; they do not make a profit out of that kind of energy provision. Indeed, we must have strong Government intervention to achieve that. In Germany, they have done it; with their feed-in tariffs being brought in years ago, the Germans are effectively decades ahead of us. In just a decade or two, half of their energy will be provided by alternative means. We are talking about enormous proportions of energy, and we have to go for that.

It has been said so many times, but we have wind on our shores and we are surrounded by sea and tides. We are aware of a positive move towards using the Severn barrage, that will produce enormous amounts of our energy, but there are other forms of generation, too, which could be flexible and provide us with base load, such as generation by burning organic waste, or anaerobic digestion. Unlike with wind and sun, we can turn that on and off. If we invested heavily in anaerobic digestion, so that all the organic waste was used to produce methane, which could be used either directly or to generate electricity, it would provide a massive contribution to the core base load of our electricity and energy provision. We have to go in this direction. We have to resist the power and controls of the energy companies and go for an alternative energy and green energy society.

I congratulate the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) on securing this important debate. If we do not move in this direction, we will be in serious economic trouble as well as environmental trouble.