Energy Markets

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that question, because he alluded to one of the key points about the future of gas storage—the Rough field—and what will happen with that in the future. He will know that there were suggestions that the Rough field should be used for hydrogen storage. That is now not happening, and the Rough field is available for quite a large expansion in overall gas storage.

Having said that, we do not have enormous amounts of gas storage. On the other hand, we do have access to very secure forms of gas, albeit traded on the international markets, with the pipeline interconnectors that we have, the Norwegian gas supply that is freely available to us and, as I mentioned, with the development of LPG terminals in this country, we have the ability to land large amounts of LPG and to store it as well.

My assessment of gas security would be that, although we do not have a huge amount of gas storage, we have, collectively, a pretty secure gas security arrangement. I just drop in the point that we are producing increasing amounts of biogas in the UK, which is beginning to come to a few percentage parts of the gas supply overall. Again, that is a homegrown, secure way of doing it. That I think means that, although we will have a future management issue of declining gas in the system—and there is much less gas going into the system now than a few years ago—we nevertheless have a pretty secure gas arrangement in the UK.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, having been a Minister through six energy crises rather similar to this one, I cannot resist a bit of sympathy with Ministers having to go through it all again and explain the difficulties over which we have very little control.

Is not the simple truth behind all this that Governments, and this Government certainly, have persistently underestimated the amount of clean electricity that we are going to need for any kind of serious green transition? The data centres—I gather 71 of them are planned—are going to drink it all up. We simply need massive new investment at a pace that does not seem to be contemplated or considered at all. At the moment, we are still talking about 10 years until we try out the SMRs that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, referred to. We are still arguing about whether Sizewell C, another giant replica, can possibly be afforded and who is going to pay. We are still facing the fact that we are going to need to draw energy of every kind and every source, including particularly gas, from wherever we can get it through interconnectors, neighbours and LNG—the lot—in order to have a modern economy and recovery and growth. It that not the reality?

Can the Minister assure us that the Department for Energy, which seems so lost in all this, has got a grip on the pace at which we need to accelerate our nuclear decisions, storage, which the Minister has been talking about, and all the rest? We seem to be wandering along, with the next crisis almost looming up while we are standing here.

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

The noble Lord, who has great experience in these matters, makes important points about how we have to cope with substantial additional electricity demand, particularly as we electrify the economy as a whole, and for new things such as data centre demand and so on. Certainly, calculations suggest that the UK low-carbon energy economy, and the tremendous steps forward in procuring offshore and onshore wind, floating wind and various other things, is beginning to inform the quantum of energy that is needed. There are a lot of difficulties in that process, such as connections which we need to get on with very rapidly and various other things, to make sure that we can decongest the system and that the energy that we are producing gets to where we want it to be. Overall, the low-carbon energy revolution is up to the task of producing the additional electricity that we are going to use in the system for the future.