Fuel Supplies: War in Iran

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

My noble friend is right that this does not fall within my brief particularly, but I do know a bit about the subject he is raising, which is synthetic ammonia supplies from the Middle East. We do not have ammonia production in this country at the moment, so there is potentially a long-term issue of ammonia supplies coming into the UK and into a lot of other countries across the world, as my noble friend mentioned. Part of the solution is to go for different sources of ammonia which are not synthetic, particularly green ammonia and other forms of fertiliser such as digestate, which can fulfil substantially the role played by ammonia in the farming cycle.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I am not sure that any of the figures we have heard in the last few minutes are correct or substantial. In fact, there is a huge amount around the world of spare oil capacity and oil production potential which can be and is being brought into play. There is the vast boost in American shale, obviously, from which we get a lot already. There are the reserves which have been released under the scheme which I chaired in 1979 at the IEA, and those reserves are only a small part of more reserves that can be developed at any time we wish. There are pipelines which bypass the Strait of Hormuz. All I am saying is that the situation can be overexcited by an ill-informed media. Does the Minister agree that we should be careful not to excite these dangers and realise that this is a manageable situation if we take a strong line on what can be done to reopen the Strait of Hormuz when we can and in the meantime do not get so worked up that everyone starts talking about rationing and other idiotic ideas?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I hope the noble Lord does not consider that the figures and other facts that I have presented this afternoon are all erroneous, because I assure him that they are not, but he is right to say that this is not a question just of whether stuff goes through the Strait of Hormuz or nothing. There are a great many other ways in which oil, petroleum products, gas and so on can be taken from their source to where they want to go without going through the Strait of Hormuz. For example, pipelines across Arabia are already beginning to take some of the oil that otherwise would go through the Strait of Hormuz out to port, and the same is true with gas supplies. It is not all about LNG coming in vessels going through the Strait of Hormuz. I totally agree with the noble Lord that we should not be too taken up by overexcitable, ill-informed press speculation but should concentrate on the real facts and the real opportunities that there are to gather ourselves a sustainable oil and gas supply, which also includes making sure that as much as possible of our energy supply comes from home sources in the medium and long term.

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.

National Policy Statement for Nuclear Energy Generation

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, like the Minister, I look forward very much to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Maclean. With her reputation and past work, I am sure she will bring a fresh mind. Fresh minds are certainly needed in this area, where technology is changing extremely fast—faster than some people realise.

If I could find a word to sum up my feelings about EN-7, it would be one borrowed from the Prime Minister, who uses it quite frequently. I am afraid it is “disappointment”. I am disappointed. When I went to get EN-7 from the Printed Paper Office, I thought the office had failed to give me all the adequate paper, because when I read it through, I could not find very much addressing all the energy issues that are preoccupying the people of our nation and the industry. I am sorry to say that it left me very disappointed. It is not very different from EN-6, which mentioned SMRs. It is not all that different from EN-1, published back in November 2023, which also mentioned SMRs and so on. There is a difference: the move towards more criteria-based decisions for sites, which I will come to in a moment, and more references throughout to SMRs. They are included in the words, but not very much in the action.

I sound—and feel—negative. When I opened it, I found that the very first sentence of the entire document, about demand doubling, is wrong. It does not seem to be understood by the department that we are running at about 65 gigawatts of electricity—these figures are rough—which is 20% of our total energy use. The talk in the first sentence of the document is that demand will

“more than double by 2050”.

As I said, 65 gigawatts is 20% of total energy use, so double will be 130 gigawatts. That is miles below what will be required for an all-electric decarbonised economy. It will be well above 130: most people who examine these things closely say that it will be more like 250, and some say 300 gigawatts. That is the kind of clean energy volume we have to mobilise, and I totally agree with the Minister that nuclear is essential to it. With 3,000 hours of windless time around the United Kingdom and in this part of northern Europe, we will need a massive nuclear contribution, miles above what we have now or are likely to have in the next two or three years. The official figure is 24 or 25 gigawatts. I would like to take a bet—except I am not a betting man—that we will wish we had 50 gigawatts by the time we move into the 2030s. I am very glad to hear that, from the Minister’s and the Government’s point of view, there is no limit on what we should be building; it should be determined by other factors.

As for SMRs, which the rest of the world is busily ordering, I can find nothing here on the obvious siting differences arising between putting down on the ground sets of four, six or eight smaller reactors, depending on their size and the total required, and putting them down on different areas from the usual list, which appears on page 10 and is the list we have all been looking at for the last 20 or 30 years. It seems to miss out the possibilities of all the other abandoned, closed or still-suitable sites.

I am not arguing for a moment that the world is ready for individual SMRs to be placed at the end of this or that street or in this or that locality. I do not think the public are ready for that. There has been absolutely no education of or discussion with the public on the question of ionised radiation machinery being spread around the country. I am talking entirely about sites that either have been, are still or could be safely and securely nuclear. What about all the old Magnox sites? What happened to them? There are Trawsfynydd, Berkeley, Hinkley Point A and Sizewell A—followed by B, which was the only one that was rescued from the ones I announced in the lower House in October 1979 when we wanted nine new reactors, but only one emerged from that plan. There are Heysham 1 and Dungeness B, which I have visited and has, I think, already closed, and there are the old coal-fired stations. In California, industries are saying that they do not trust the grid any more and cannot feel safe with it. They are buying up old coal stations and installing SMRs in them, very small ones, to get the reliable electricity they need for their production, so nothing is needed there.

I am looking forward to EN-8. I hope it is now being drafted, telling us the possibilities of setting down sets of small reactors from the various producers telling us that they can produce fully operative, commercially competitive models by the early 2030s, which is years ahead of anything being considered for Sizewell C. They say that the new one at Hinkley C will be completed in 2029 but, quite honestly, heaven knows when it will be. The original idea from the then chairman was that we should cook our turkeys for Christmas 2019. I think that the original deals approved by the Cameron Government and the first contacts with EDF under Tony Blair’s Labour Government were talking about an original expenditure of £9 billion. Then it became £17 billion, then £19 billion, £23 billion and so on. The latest figures I have seen are £46 billion- plus. One figure says £51 billion. Obviously, inflation affects that, but the expansion of cost has been enormous. I marvel that we want to proceed with a replica in the rather charming belief that we will have learned all the mistakes from Hinkley C and therefore it will all cost less and be much quicker. I do not believe a word of it.

There is nothing on offer about a central point when you come to building and siting nuclear power stations, which is that SMRs can be fabricated in a factory. There is not that business of trundling trucks smashing up country lanes and destroying the environment for years and years on end, which of course is one of the driving forces of planning objections and delays. If you can bring in fabrication in the factory, you gain an enormous advantage, take a great deal of heat and tension out of local objections and probably cut years off the construction time. There is nothing on the advantages of a more distributed electricity system, which is what we are discussing and what many people are beginning to analyse, and which the use of SMRs and AMRs would greatly contribute to.

That means—and this is a very important planning thing—fewer pylons. If we can distribute our electricity—if we can get to the point at which we can convey North Sea electricity through switching stations into hydrogen by electrolysis, and move that in the same way that we move petrol today; and if we can then localise and get to market electricity or an electricity vector such as hydrogen—we will need fewer pylons. That would save years of planning objection, difficulty and political problems. I am amazed that there is nothing about that.

There is nothing on the fuel side. Some companies have said that they can manage perfectly well without enriched uranium at all. They are going to use already irradiated plutonium, of which we have a store at Sellafield, which we are guarding at considerable cost. That is a whole new possibility.

Above all—I know I am a little over my time—the factor that is really missing in this is finance, on which there is nothing. The fact is that small reactors can be financed profitably and will be in the future. There are several companies ready to do that without government money, whereas the big boys—the giant gigawatt machines—will cost the Government money, which means that they will cost the consumers, who are already overloaded, and the taxpayers money. Both Sizewell and Hinkley C, the big ones in the pipeline, are already in deep financial trouble. We remain to see and hear how they will get out of it.

The whole world is into this new design system. Countries are ordering and building SMRs. Canada is putting four in Ontario. Denmark has said it wants to start, after years of being anti-nuclear. Indonesia has ordered 20. Poland is in the business, as are Korea, Japan, the United States and, of course, China and Russia. They are all building small nuclear reactors. There is a very long queue building up, and we will be at the end of it unless we move very fast indeed—faster than this EN-7 indicates or suggests.

Nuclear: Small Modular Reactors

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 19th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords—

[Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, we will hear from the Cross Benches.

Energy Prices: Energy-intensive Industries

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I hesitate to answer the noble Baroness by saying “in due course”. Clearly, these matters are being discussed very fully in my department, and we want to reach a conclusion as quickly as possible, but I cannot give her a date.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, if the Minister is correct in his economic theory about gas and electricity prices—frankly, I am not sure that he is—why is the lower price of oil, which is now getting quite low, not bringing down the price of gas as well?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, it is because of marginal pricing, whereby gas is the most predominant, and it tends to set the price. As my noble friend said, this system has operated for many years, but we are looking at it very carefully.

Energy Grid Resilience

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much take my noble friend’s point; I will certainly take it on board and discuss it with colleagues. In relation to energy security, I have already said that we must maintain a resilient and secure electricity system. It is a key priority for us. We work closely with the National Protective Security Authority. I pay tribute to my noble friend for the contribution that he has made to these discussions. We are providing extensive advice and support to industry on what measures it should take to protect itself, but I take the point about communication with the public and it is something that I will reflect upon.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

I want to reinforce the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. He is right, and the Minister is right, that in the past we did indeed have resilience. In this sort of case, resilience means bringing in a large amount of extra supply at very short notice, such as could be performed at Dinorwig, the pump storage station, which I was told could bring in several gigawatts at two minutes’ notice and, furthermore, that even if it was never used, the entire system would allow other plants to run at a higher margin, with a higher inertia factor, and, therefore, provide even more resilience and effectiveness for the whole system. In this age, as we move into reliance on renewables on a massive scale, are we providing extra support of that kind—rapid resource mobilisation—which will give us the modern and reliable system that we are going to need to compete in the modern world?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

Yes, my Lords, we are. It is a very relevant point. Clearly, we are looking for a balanced energy mix for the future. We see nuclear as being an essential baseload. We will have renewables, but we are looking at hydro storage, as the noble Lord reflected in his own question. The whole point is that we will have a balanced system, but one that is heavily decarbonised. That is exactly the aim of what we seek to do.

Wales: Nuclear Power Generation

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Tuesday 29th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I take the noble Lord’s point. EN-7, on which we are consulting, gives us a much more flexible policy on siting, but those sites identified in the current planning statement, EN-6, clearly have very favourable attributes, and this is where I think Wylfa has to be considered. His overall welcome support for new nuclear is to be acknowledged and welcomed.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, some of us have been talking to the main SMR producers this very morning. Their general message is that wait, delay and obstruction are their findings in dealing with the British Government, unfortunately. They are waiting for site sales to be settled, for the GDA and DCO processes to be accelerated, and, obviously, for the government lead that they all need. They say that they could produce earlier, by years, than anything that could come from Sizewell C or other, larger developments. They point to the facts that they could do it without government money and that the order books are rapidly filling up in all other countries. There really is a sense of urgency if our nation is to reach our desirable goals on reliable, affordable energy. Please can the Minister get on with the job?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree with the last statement by the noble Lord, but I do not agree with what he said. The Government are very focused on development of new nuclear. He knows that, in relation to small modular reactors, we have a process by Great British Nuclear, which is going through a detailed series of negotiations, with final decisions to be made over the next few weeks. We were bequeathed that process by the Government that the noble Lord supported. His party did not open a single nuclear power station. I can tell him that, as far as SMRs are concerned, I have been to many fora discussing this with companies. They are clearly awaiting the outcome of the GBN process, and we will make progress following that.

Energy Prices

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

The noble Lord is clearly right that energy efficiency in our homes is necessary if we are going to meet the net zero target by 2050 and hold down the cost for domestic consumers. I cannot give him a date, but I can say that my department is working across Whitehall on the policies we need to enunciate to get going in that area.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, has the Minister noticed that the chairman of Électricité de France has just been sacked and that, understandably, advice has been given to EDF to spend less money on overseas investments and concentrate on power in France? Can he give us an idea of what effect that has on our one major nuclear development, Hinkley, where, of course, EDF is a major player, and on Sizewell C, where it is a minor but considerable player? Is this not rather dangerous, given that nuclear power, along with renewables, is absolutely necessary to get our costs down in future?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I have noticed the change in leadership at EDF, and we look forward to having discussions in the future with the new person who has been appointed. EDF has made a major investment in Hinkley Point C and, as the noble Lord says, is an important minority shareholder in Sizewell C. We have enjoyed a good relationship with EDF. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero met with his counterpart in the French Government only a few weeks ago, and we maintain close contact with both the French Government and EDF. We will have to see how this unfolds over the next few weeks, but I am confident that we will see progress towards the opening of Hinkley Point C and a final investment decision on Sizewell C.

UK Energy: Grid Decarbonisation

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 24th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I understand the noble Lord’s concern. He will know that the Great British Energy Bill is being debated in the other place in a day or two’s time. I understand the point that he raises and we will look at that letter with a great deal of consideration. We are committed to tackling the issue of forced labour in supply chains, and legislation and guidance are already in place to help businesses take action against modern slavery.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

Could the Minister, who is usually very clear, be a little clearer with us about what is meant by decarbonising the grid by 2030? A number of authorities are saying that that is not what is going to happen at all. A number of gas-generating electricity stations are already being commissioned, and when they are there in 2030, as they will be, they will emit large amounts of carbon dioxide. How is that going to be handled? How is it going to be buried? Have the contracts begun for carbon capture and storage? It does not appear that there is much sign of that.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord will recall that we signed contracts in December to launch the first carbon capture, usage and storage project. We expect that, by 2030, clean sources of energy will produce at least 95% of Great Britain’s generation, and gas power generation will be there mainly as a back-up.

Great British Energy Bill

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

3rd reading
Tuesday 25th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I briefly add my remarks to those of the noble Baronesses, Lady McIntosh and Lady Bennett, about the community energy fund. I thank the Minister for responding so positively to my noble friend Lord Vaux by bringing forward this amendment on more general accountability. It is a good step forward, but will he respond on those companies—I gather there are around 150—that would have been eligible for the community energy fund but will not be able to receive funding if the money indeed runs out in May, as is forecast? On that specific point, when the £100 million runs out in May, what will be put in its place?

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I find the amendment extremely interesting. Perhaps I may just make a general point about the nature of such amendments and provisions outside this Bill. We see here a grey area between what is strictly on the Government’s credit and bill under the PSBR and what is in the private sector. Previous Governments have been caught on this barbed wire for many years as to what lies in the public sector and influences the Government’s credit and what does not. I think we are going to see the model contained in the Minister’s amendment in many other areas as well. Right around the world, Governments have all the demands on them to make utilities work, vast changes to infrastructure and so on, and the private sector has the money. Somehow, the two must be brought together, as we tried to do in the late 1990s with PFI—the private finance initiative—which ran into great difficulties, but there were some lessons to be learned from it.

We have to learn more lessons now, otherwise the finance for these things simply will not be found. This applies particularly in the energy sector, where very large investments are required over many years. The Government cannot do it because they cannot raise the money and the private sector does not want to take such risks. This is very interesting, and I see that the Minister has done his best in plunging into this still very grey area, because we do not really know how to define accountability or what it is we are calling to account.

As to the amendment itself, I had to smile. We have had similar arrangements in the distant past for bodies that are neither public nor private, and this is an attempt to overcome the problems of that in the past.

It is, frankly, not very easy to evaluate the amendment to appoint this independent person to review effectiveness if we are not quite sure what “effectiveness” means. It says, “turn to Section 5(1) on the obligations on the Secretary of State to lay down certain criteria”, which, apparently, he has not done yet, so we do not know what the criteria will be. They will appear in six months’ time. Of course, it is easy to think of various criteria to allow one to say, “An organisation has, unfortunately, lost a lot of money but has still done terribly well, because I have these criteria here which show that it has achieved certain other objectives”. There are criteria that we can think about: externalities, opportunities for broader contributions, geopolitical objectives. All these things not only rest on highly subjective judgments but will be very far in the future. The analogy comes to mind of goalposts on wheels: the goalposts have been moved from time to time and from year to year as to whether effectiveness has been achieved, even though a lot of money may have been lost.

I have to put in a reservation that all these issues are matters of intense debate. All round the planet some of the best minds are wrestling with the effectiveness measurements of certain huge investments of a green nature, which look terrific but, unfortunately, either do not make money or go wrong, but nevertheless contribute to some part of the battle against climate violence and to some limitation on the ever-rising carbon dioxide and methane emissions.