Renewable Energy: Costs

Lord Hain Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, in October 2006 Professor Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank, later introduced as the noble Lord, Lord Stern, vividly briefed the Cabinet on the looming climate crisis. His central message was that the costs of combating it will be high, but the costs of not doing so will be immeasurably higher. How right he was and how wrong the noble Lord, Lord Frost, is. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich said so eloquently, the science and the devastating effects of global heating are indisputable, as extreme weather—chaos, droughts and mega-floods—batters the planet, most recently in Spain.

Renewables are getting much cheaper, gas more expensive and nuclear power incredibly more expensive, especially with its decommissioning and waste storage costs. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has estimated the future costs of the nuclear decommissioning mission at a colossal £105.3 billion, significantly taxpayer funded. Offshore Energies UK also reports spiralling costs and a dramatic hike in the decommissioning costs for oil and gas platforms and plugging oil and gas wells, costing taxpayers over £16 billion from a 2021 Tory-funded deal. In March 2023, independent research showed that, since 2015, the last Conservative Government gave £20 billion more in support to fossil fuel producers than to renewables.

There is no doubt that generating electricity from nuclear power costs significantly more than generating it from solar and wind. Then there is the enormous untapped potential of marine energy: notably, the very low-cost tidal power from the Severn estuary, with the second highest tidal rise and fall in the world, which has never been harnessed and surely must now be.

Britain’s dependence on fossil fuel markets controlled by autocrats such as Vladimir Putin has left us vulnerable to energy price spikes, as well as the escalating costs of the climate emergency. That is why our Labour Government have committed to delivering clean, homegrown energy by 2030, meaning electricity based on renewables, nuclear and clean energy technologies that we control at home, rather than fossil fuels sold on volatile international markets. Last week, the National Energy System Operator—NESO, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Frost—published an independent, expert analysis showing that clean power can lead to cheaper and more secure electricity for households. A wide range of groups from business leaders to trade union leaders, the International Energy Agency and leading UK and international companies, such as National Grid, Scottish Power and SSE, have backed this.

We need Labour’s pro-energy security, pro-growth, pro-jobs, pro-climate and lower cost policy to tackle the climate emergency with real urgency. Prioritising green, clean renewable energy is about choosing investment over decline, new skilled jobs over low productivity ones, growth over stagnation, and cheaper over more expensive consumer prices—or, as the noble Lord, Lord Stern, might have said to the Cabinet meeting that I attended in 2006, investing in the short term to save over the longer term.