Electricity System Resilience (S&T Committee Report)
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I was not a member of this excellent committee. I declare an interest as an adviser to Mitsubishi Electric. Like others, I agree that this is an extremely valuable report. In fact, I would go further and say that it casts a much-needed beam of light on an area where in the past we have not been told the full facts or what it is going to cost us. So the report is excellent, and its message is quite appalling. That reliability of power supply should be even an issue in one of the world’s leading industrial nations—the nation that founded the Industrial Revolution based on steam and power—is quite amazing and deplorable. It makes one ponder what has gone wrong and what has happened. This report helps enormously in beginning to answer that question.
Of course, the lights will stay on in the short term. That is obvious, and we are right about that. Thanks largely to the immense skills of National Grid, which is a brilliant company, and various devices, which I will come to, on the supply side and the demand side, in the short term, in the next two or three years, we will have adequate power, even at the most difficult times, unless something really catastrophic happens. It is going to cost us; it is going to be expensive, and I will come to that, too.
Then we come to the medium-term future. The issue is the capacity margin, however you define it: the derated margin or the full-capacity margin. That is a central issue. Here I have one slight quibble with the report, although I think that the noble Earl, with his excellent chairmanship and his excellent speech, clarified this. Paragraphs 23 and 71 state that the additional capacity that would be brought forward by the capacity market is 49 gigawatts. That is true, but it does not quite tell the story, which is that in terms of new capacity the auction so far has brought forward miserably little: 2.7 gigawatts, which consists of only one single combined-cycle gas turbine, the Carlton Power one, which admittedly is quite a big one, and a lot of small capacity. The larger figure of 49 gigawatts comes not from truly additional new capacity but from existing companies in the power game crowding in and seeking to get contracts for capacity payments to add to theirs so that they can get capacity revenues on top of market revenues. That is natural; any one of us would do the same.
So that is terrific: except, as my noble friend Lord Ridley reminded us, in 2018-19 it is going to cost just under £1 billion—£956 million, to be exact—which will all be piled on to the consumer, and I think that he mentioned an even higher figure for 2020. These are enormous sums of money, and what are they buying? We are going to need at least 20 to 25 new gigawatts of capacity in the late 2010s and early 2020s to compensate for the fact that our coal stations are being closed at a great rate, thanks to the European directive for larger combustion and the fact that our nuclear fleet is ageing and some of it will have to be closed as well. So that is the scene up to 2018.
In the short term, as I said, the national grid will be able to cope. It will use all sorts of devices such as the supplemental balancing reserve, which will cost a bit, and the demand side balancing reserve, which may involve what we used to call in the old days of gas supply interruptible contracts, where a firm agrees that it could bring on its own local generation or somehow manage to do without for a time if there is a crisis—all of that, of course, at more expense. As one of the reports before us today reminds us, domestic bills have doubled since 2004. Paragraph 217 of this excellent report tells us that up to last year green policy costs had added 15% to bills; by 2020 that figure will be 27% and by 2030 the figure will be 29%. There is a case for subsidy. I am not against the idea of infant industries being encouraged, but only up to a point.
The report reminds us that the policy of the last seven or so years, at the end of the Labour Government but particularly under the coalition, which was largely under the guidance of our then friends the Liberal Democrats, went too far, too fast. Many good things emerged from the coalition but, frankly, our energy policy was not one of them. It was a bad legacy. I heard one of your Lordships say in last Thursday’s debate what a wonderful success energy policy had been under the coalition, and I did not know whether to laugh or cry. In fact, on almost every front that success has turned into a miserable failure; my noble friend Lord Ridley put it in even more graphic terms. It was of course a policy inherited from Labour, particularly from Mr Miliband when he was at the Department for Energy and Climate Change. It was called the trilemma and someone was going to solve it, but in reality it has been a complete failure on the three fronts.
What are those three fronts? The first is affordability. That has gone out of the window: we have some of the most expensive electricity in Europe. We have households having to go to fuel banks in order to get tokens to get enough money to stay warm, which is an incredible situation in this country. We had a story graphically put before us by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield about the impact on our steel industry, which is appalling, and where energy costs have undoubtedly played a major part. So affordability has been a failure.
The second aim was supposed to be reliability. Well, here we are, talking about reliability and security; I think that we will get through, but it has been quite a narrow margin and will continue to be.
The third front was decarbonisation. There are different views on this. If you look only at the production of energy, it is true that CO2 has fallen quite dramatically, partly because of the recession and flat demand, and partly because of various measures taken. Of course, carbon does not come only from the production of energy; it comes from a huge range of sources, and carbon per head is consumed in vast quantities by imports as well as by the whole carbon leakage process that other speakers have described. This is a scene that leaves one—“sad” is the right word, but I shall say almost “depressed” that so many policy errors have been made and applauded that have led to such an appalling situation.
We have been saved for the moment by the national grid. I think that later we will be saved to some degree by the interconnectors: we should be able to get up to 5 gigawatts from interconnectors in the middle of the next decade, which will be—this will please the climate change lobby—mostly green electricity. There will be volcanic from Iceland, if we build a wire to there, and hydraulic storage from Norway, while the Danes will supply us with wind power; they have such a surplus that someone suggested that they would actually pay us to take it. We will also be saved a bit by prolonging the life of the old warhorse, AGR reactors. They can go on a little longer into the 2020s, so that is another possibility. We will be saved if the storage technology develops fast, and may be saved a bit by the development of local power of various sorts—small modular reactors and so on.
I do not know about fusion, which the noble Lord, Lord Broers, referred to. When I was Secretary of State, the late Walter Marshall came into my office to try to explain it to me. He began by saying, “It’s like trying to put the sun into a bottle”. That was his description and it rather left me without words. As my noble friend Lord Lawson said, it all looks very much the thing of the future, but somehow it never arrives.
For the longer term, we have to have a safe system. We cannot go on living with this constant worry about margins for the next 10 or 20 years. We need a new, less expensive and more realistic policy, frankly explained and costed. This report does a marvellous job in helping in that direction—but, my goodness, we certainly need it.
Global Climate Change
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years ago)
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Lord Hunt of Chesterton
The noble Lord is quite right about the rising level of carbon dioxide having an effect on greening. But equally, the average amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising because of the release of heat by the combustion of oil and coal, and indeed from the burning of forests. Several studies have commented that there will be areas of the world where, to start with, this rise in carbon dioxide will lead to an increase in agriculture—for example, near the equator—but the point is made that as the temperature keeps on rising, this local advantage will be considerably overwhelmed by the increase in temperature. If we reach 3 degrees or 4 degrees—if we make no progress—that will have a devastating impact. So the noble Lord is right but it is also a question of the timeframe we are thinking about.
I want to comment on another feature of the rising sea level and its impact. There are areas of the world where the sea level is rising three times faster than the average. The islands that I mentioned are planning for their eventual abandonment. Noble Lords who know the history of this place will know that in the 11th and 12th centuries, we regularly had extraordinary floods in what is now our Parliament—but, fortunately, we are still here.
In the light of these increasingly hazardous impacts on societies worldwide, what would happen if the world began not merely to stop increasing the emission of carbon dioxide but to start reducing those emissions, over a few decades, back to the levels of 100 years ago? The evidence from computer models presented at the Royal Society in 2014 was that, for example, polar ice would return. When people ask why we should make these big changes to our lifestyle and reduce our energy use, the answer is that making them may well enable us to restore some aspects of the environment. If we do not do so, the environment could change more or less irreversibly.
The UK’s cross-party legislation in 2008 and legislation since then in other countries such as Mexico, along with the European Union’s political agreements, have introduced a timetable of steady reduction. It is good news that the European Union countries are on course to meet their reduction targets of 20% by 2020 and 40% by 2030. It is surprising as some rather major countries have been increasing their carbon dioxide emissions. However, that enables Her Majesty’s Government and our European partners to argue for the 150 or more countries assembled in Paris to introduce their own policies. It can be done.
One reason for some measured optimism at this time in the evolution of science and government regarding climate change is that China agreed at the previous climate meeting, in Durban in 2012, to introduce emissions reduction targets by 2015. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Stern, is in his seat. We had many discussions about China’s position before the Copenhagen meeting in 2009. At that point, China was moving ahead with efforts to make its emissions more efficient—that is, having fewer emissions per unit of energy. Now, however, it is talking about targets to reduce emissions which will be implemented by 2020. Since then, China and some other countries have been increasing the practical measures they are taking. Moreover, despite the objections of the United States Congress to his policies, President Obama has targets and policies for emissions reductions of 17% by 2020.
What is needed in practice is to make breakthroughs in energy use and production. It was interesting to hear, at a meeting of European parliamentarians in Paris in September, a review of the different methods being introduced. In some senses, France is the leading country in Europe as it has the lowest carbon emissions per person because it uses all the technologies, such as nuclear fission, wind, solar and so on. To some extent, the UK is following in that path. Interestingly, the car industry—a major source of contributions, occasionally up to 30% in some countries—is talking about very great reductions in emissions and improvements in efficiency. Another way that we can reduce our energy consumption is to have more efficient buildings. It is extraordinary that high-performance bricks are imported to the UK from Switzerland and we have not developed our own industry in this really important technology.
The generation of renewable energy is another aspect of the issue. Although there has been much development of renewable energy in this country, there is also great concern about reduced subsidies for solar PV. We hear about many small businesses in the more depressed areas of the UK going into insolvency and bankruptcy. I hope the Minister will respond on that point. Government documents emphasise the business opportunities associated with introducing technology for reducing emissions. That is a very important feature, and one hopes that HMG will be displaying UK technology solutions at the Paris conference in December.
Another role for UK expertise, finance and industry is in helping to make countries more resilient against hazards and their impacts, and UK businesses are making a particularly strong effort in developing countries. It is very important that the UK science base is maintained at the highest international level to provide competitive advice. This week, the Japanese embassy noted the importance of collaboration with the UK on tsunami damage, and Japan wants to have a United Nations day for dealing with tsunamis, which of course have caused many tens of thousands of casualties. Tsunamis are not, of course, caused by climate change, but with sea level rises, the danger of further inland penetration is an important factor.
The other important point I wanted to make about environmental hazards—I have already touched on the air pollution aspect—is that, in many other countries of the world, one of the ways of dealing with these extreme air pollution events is by using the media to warn people and, in particular, to advise traffic and people controlling emissions to reduce those emissions. We in this Parliament have had several Parliamentary Questions addressing the Department for Transport but it has refused to use its abilities to communicate with drivers and urge them to reduce their emissions.
Similarly, the UK is an important member of the international—
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
I have to ask one more question from the lay point of view about some of the things that the noble Lord is saying. Is he saying that CO2 causes air pollution or that nitrous oxide causes it? He is absolutely right that CO2 causes global warming, but does it actually pollute the atmosphere? He seems to be saying that it does.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton
As I have said, this debate is about CO2 but also about air pollution, which is a health problem. If you drive on French motorways, you will see signs saying, “Drive more slowly: you will reduce pollution and reduce carbon dioxide”. We could do the same, but apparently the Department for Transport does not want to.
Finally, one further aspect of pollution and climate is shipping. As I have said several times from these Benches, the International Maritime Organization is across the river. Ships are responsible for something like 15% of carbon emissions. Many solutions have been suggested to make ships more efficient, such as having them go more slowly, but the British Government are not very strong in pushing this compared with other countries.
Energy Bill [HL]
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, I had not thought that what we were dealing with was liquid legislation. I thought we were dealing with piecemeal transitional arrangements dreamt up on the hoof as we go through the process. But I am quite prepared for the right reverend Prelate to give us this liquid legislation definition in perpetuity. It is a rather splendid phrase.
This has been a really unsatisfactory Bill and we must not allow ourselves to see this as an argument about onshore subsidy protectionism. It is not about that at all. I think that everybody in the House recognises that the period of subsidy for onshore wind may well come to an end at some point in the nearish future. It is much more about what it is that we want to try to do to send signals about our climate change intentions and to adhere to our own regulatory principles. I have been a regulator three times on behalf of the Government and on each occasion I have absolutely worked my socks off to make sure that we are as fair as possible to British industry. Fairness means giving clarity of policy and adequate times for industry to adjust, meaning that companies are not caught with their foot on the wrong side of a piece of change and penalised as a result of their previously sensible decisions in line with what previously had been government policy. Even with the very welcome changes to the grace periods that the Minister has laid before us, we are still not there.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, talked about the statement made yesterday by the Energy Minister in another place. I was a bit distressed to hear the Minister here say that we have made lots of concessions and we now have enough renewable energy from onshore wind in the pipeline. I do not think that that is the point. The point is, have we dealt fairly with British industry and given anybody who could reasonably consider themselves not to have been fairly dealt with the benefit of the doubt in this circumstance, where, all of a sudden, policy has shifted? The Minister said that there had been extensive consultation with the companies and stakeholders, yet many noble Lords will have been lobbied and briefed by players in the energy business, who, even this morning, have been listing a series of situations where, through no fault of their own, they continue to be penalised by the graceperiod arrangements.
I simply ask the Minister to consider some of the circumstances that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, aptly summarised in such an eloquent fashion to ensure that the statement made by the Energy Minister yesterday about fairness is adhered to and that we do not continue to see liquid legislation that is simply piecemeal, illogical and very damaging, both to our climate change image in the world and the image in terms of British industry about whether reliable frameworks in which companies can realistically work will continue to come from this Government.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I was not going to intervene at this stage, but the right reverend Prelate’s intervention and his association with my noble friend Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation prompted me to pursue the point that he raised. A lot of our discussion has been on the penalties —in other words, the removal of subsidies from people who thought that they had a chance of the subsidy when they started their projects. That is aside from whether the project is environmentally okay or whether they get local government approval for planning reasons and so on; it is simply the question of whether they were caught by various delays and, therefore, would not get the subsidies that they thought they would get when they set out.
We are not in any way trying to stop the development of the very successful parts of the onshore windfarm industry. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, reminded us, electricity from wind power is getting cheaper. If it is getting cheaper, it will in due course need less subsidy. Remarks from outside this country—particularly an ill-informed remark by the UN adviser, Professor McGlade, that somehow Britain was putting a stop to its movements towards low-carbonisation by putting a stopper on all wind power and so on—are way out of kilter and far from representing where we stand.
It is no less interesting to work out to what extent these grace periods will help the situation—I thoroughly approve of all the amendments that my noble friend has brought forward with such assiduity. Presumably, as a result of these grace periods, we will see slightly more subsidy paid out, which has to come from the consumer—the industrial consumer in particular—than we would have done before he introduced the amendments. The money that was not going to come from somewhere has to come from somewhere. Somebody will have to pay for it. This is on a day when we are staggering under the colossal redundancies that have been announced throughout the steel industry—including the steel industry in Scotland—which, we are told, are overwhelmingly the result of very high energy costs. Apparently, for electricity, we are paying twice the German level. In turn, of course, energy costs for the steel industry of Europe are leading people to predict that the entire industry will be wiped out. At a time like this, we need to watch with needle sharpness what is happening to the costs that are falling on the industries where all these jobs are being destroyed. How much more of that cost is still going to persist in meeting all the grace period conditions which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, with his massive legal knowledge and detailed grasp of the situation, has described as being necessary and fair? How much more will this kind of fairness cost in the end in burdens on the electricity users of Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom in ways which will precipitate even further these appalling redundancies? We need to keep that side of the argument very clearly in our minds.
Baroness Worthington
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing the government amendments. I will speak to those and also to Amendment 78C in my name, and in support of the amendments tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace.
As we enter the second day of Report, I do not feel that the Bill has been well handled, as has already been referenced. This may stem from the fact that the Bill was not ready when it was presented to us. Significant areas of policy were still being developed. It was a very fluid situation. In fact, the term “liquid legislation” will probably stay with us for many years to come. It was coined by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, in the recommital stage of Committee and describes very accurately how we have been dealing with a set of moving parts as we have gone through the Bill. Here we are on Report, but it still feels very much like a Committee stage, and that is regrettable. We should not be in this situation where we have so many controversial issues still unresolved.
Throughout the Bill’s passage, I have pressed the Minister to give me a justification and a sound argument why the Government have chosen the route that they have in this Energy Bill of introducing what is now Clause 66 regarding the early closure of a renewables support scheme that was already closing 12 months early—and, in fact, not closing it to everybody but just to one subsection of technology: onshore wind. Why do we find ourselves in a place where the Government appear to have singled out for special treatment a single technology from all the low-carbon technologies available to us, and where that special treatment is so damaging and corrosive to investor confidence? I am afraid that I have not received a suitable answer to that question throughout the passage of the Bill. Now the answer given boils down to a very few words that appeared in the Tory Party manifesto, that the Conservative Party would put an end to—
Viscount Ridley
I had actually pretty well come to the end of my remarks anyway—but on the subject of energy-intensive users, we have good evidence from all sorts of people, including what we heard on the news last night from the head of Tata UK. He said that energy was a huge contributor to its decision. The cost of energy in this country is crucial. As I said before, if this is really just about a minor adjustment to the timing of the introduction of the measure, why are we arguing about the whole industry?
Lord Howell of Guildford
I did not want to make an intervention on an intervention, but may I say something now? I agree that we are talking about whether Clause 66 should stand, but the argument has constantly been widened, and the noble Baroness who just intervened raised again the question of what all this does to energy costs, and whether energy costs are important. The noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, made some comments about that as well. The facts are the facts. The director of the Energy Intensive Users Group has said that,
“a third of the cost of industrial electricity bills in Britain is being spent on green energy taxes, such as the two-year-old carbon price floor support mechanism … and this would rise to about half of all bills by 2020”.
The director of UK Steel has said that,
“rising energy costs were a critical reason for the crisis afflicting the industry, which also led to the collapse of the SSI steel plant in Redcar last month”.
And so it goes, on and on. We cannot just dismiss all this. It cannot be pushed away. I agree that it should not be the central issue in the debate on this clause, but some of the remarks that have been made cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged, because they are just not true.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, I strongly support the wise words of my noble friend Lord Ridley. I am one of those who believes that certain types of power are uneconomic, unreliable and unsightly. It is because of the latter point as much as anything else that the Prime Minister made a commitment during the general election campaign, which was given force in the manifesto, that we would not fly in the face of local opinion, as we often have in the past, and build wind farms where they were not wanted. The manifesto commitment is entirely clear, and it is indeed flouting the Salisbury convention to seek to delete it. I very much hope that your Lordships will not do that. We have a duty to examine and scrutinise legislation, and when we believe it is wrong, to ask the other place to think again—but here we are seeking to delete a fundamental part of the Bill.
I am a great admirer of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington; I hope that does not embarrass her. She brings real distinction to our debates, and she speaks from true knowledge—but, by Jove, she was fishing around this afternoon. I was somewhat amused when she tried to call in aid Lady Thatcher; I am not sure that Lady Thatcher would have entirely endorsed her remarks. She then made a lovely remark about Mr Corbyn, saying that he probably did not agree with fracking or nuclear power—but that didn’t matter, because it was not going to be reflected in Labour Party policy. We are clearly in a period of political anarchy at the moment, and it will be interesting to see how long Mr Corbyn lasts, and how long his party lasts with him—but that is not what we are debating this afternoon.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on the ingenuity of the proposals in this amendment; they are fascinating and make one think very hard, because these are hugely complex issues. Perhaps I may put two questions to her and perhaps also to my noble friend.
First, will this switch to this way of trying to achieve our carbon obligations and decarbonisation lead to cheaper power in the power sector? That must be an important question. We discussed earlier the problems in the power sector and the fact that pushing it too far and too fast may not necessarily help decarbonisation but will have to be paid for in lost jobs. That is bound to be on people’s minds when looking at this kind of amendment.
The second and even more obvious question is whether these arrangements will get the combined-cycle gas turbines built. At present speed, under the contracts for difference regime, and the capacity payments auction and so on, will they get them built in time? We are now entering a very worrying period, with a very low margin of safety in our electricity system—I believe that it will be down to 1.2 gigawatts. When I had some responsibility for these matters, years ago, it was 17 gigawatts. That gives noble Lords an idea of how far we have come down thanks to the rapid closure of many coal-fired stations and so on. Will this pattern lead to that result? These may be layman’s questions addressed to a very complex issue but I would be interested to know the answers. If the implication is the other way, we will have additional costs on power and get further out of line with our competitors. We always have to remember that in the Climate Change Act—behind which the noble Baroness was one of the founding figures and driving forces—there was the reservation that we should not get too far out of line with our competitors. In some areas, we clearly have done; we are out of line. In the steel industry, as we were saying earlier, we have energy charges that fall on at least parts of that industry at twice the level of charges in Germany and, in turn, are far higher than those throughout Europe. I saw one figure showing that they are 10 times the levels in China—which might account for our present woes in the steel industry. In examining this, can we please be guided on whether this will deliver the goods? That is my question.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, I particularly wish to speak to Amendment 78UA, to which I have added my name, but I will start with Amendment 78S, which is the decarbonisation debate. I was certainly very disappointed that the Minister confirmed—he was very clear, and I welcome clarity—that the Government will not take advantage of the opportunities opened to them under the previous Energy Act and declare a decarbonisation target. We have had a lot of discussion about the Conservative manifesto, and in fact the Minister referred to it in the context of saying why that would not happen. However, the words of the Conservative manifesto were completely clear. They suggest that a decarbonisation target would meet both the Government’s objectives. The manifesto says:
“We will cut emissions as cost-effectively as possible, and will not support additional distorting and expensive power sector targets”.
That is very clear.
The point about a decarbonisation target—exactly as the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, said—is that it moves on from the distorting targets that we had for renewables in terms of decarbonising our energy sector. In fact, because it brings in proper mechanisms in terms of markets and all of that, it is actually less expensive. So, it seems that a decarbonisation target will not only help us very specifically meet our Climate Change Act targets—which the Conservative manifesto fully supports—but provide a route for those targets to be met with a non-distorting and less expensive method than we had under the renewable targets under the EU’s 2020 system and so on. This is therefore a very good and logical amendment. It is almost a vital amendment that the Government should be able to accept to fulfil their own manifesto commitments. I do not say that to make a clever lawyer’s argument; I say it because it is how I read it. It is in plain English in the manifesto.
I move on to Amendment 78UA, to which I have put my name. I pay credit to the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, for the great role that she played in bringing the Climate Change Act into being. I played a much more modest role in those days on the Front Bench of the Liberal Democrats in opposition—strangely, we are back in opposition again; but there we are. I was going to mention the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, and the fantastic work that he did with me and the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. We helped to deliver, right across the House, together with the Cross Benches, the fantastic Climate Change Act. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, did a great piece of work.
One of the things that I did then was to try to bring to the attention of the Bill team and Ministers the fact that although those carbon budgets were great, they excluded 50% of the country’s emissions because they took into account the EU ETS trading. So, in effect, government policy only controlled, or had an effect on, about 50% of UK emissions. The Bill team did not seem to understand this—albeit that at the time the department was not DECC but Defra—and nor did the Ministers particularly take an interest in it. I think that the trouble was that, once those in the Treasury understood it—at least, they certainly understood it well ahead of anybody else—they decided that they did not want this at all. Ironically, that was under a Labour Government. However, as the noble Baroness said, the Climate Change Act was a great thing.
Energy Bill [HL]
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend makes a very important and relevant point. This illustrates a great feature of this Bill, which is that we are having foisted on us all sorts of detail at short notice and at the last minute. As my noble friend said, this kind of thing should have been included in the original Bill. If it is true, as the Government claim, that they had planned this and that it is all included in their manifesto—that they had thought a lot about it and they knew exactly what they were up to—it ought to have been included in the original Bill. It is clear that they did not know what they were up to. We found this the other day when the Bill was recommitted, when we looked at pages and pages of detail that were foisted on us at the last minute. As I understand it, we still do not know some of the amendments that we are going to be discussing and approving, or otherwise, in two days’ time—major amendments with huge implications.
The Minister took a little bit of umbrage in Committee, but I do not blame the Minister personally. I would say he is piggy in the middle, except that we must not use that kind of expression anymore; he is the meat in the sandwich—you know what I mean—and is getting squeezed. He is between the devil and the deep blue sea—I am trying to think of metaphors that do not bring in animals. We are rightly demanding more details and advance notice; the industry, even more so, should know well in advance exactly what the Government’s intentions are. It is really quite unacceptable that such important things are dealt with at short notice on Report. No doubt even more will come in at a later stage in the other place.
That raises the question of why the Bill was commenced in the House of Lords. My understanding is that only non-contentious Bills are dealt with first in the House of Lords, but this is one of the most contentious Bills that has been considered for some time as a House of Lords starter. An unfortunate result is that we are having so much debate and discussion at this early stage. The Bill has to go to the House of Commons where, no doubt particularly in relation to things that affect Scotland, there will be some even more acrimonious debate and amendments will be proposed, and then the Bill will come back to us. This is really going about it in a cack-handed way.
In relation to staff who are being transferred, what happens to those who are required to move as part of the new arrangements? How many will be asked to move from one part of the United Kingdom to another? Will there be any? Will there be many? It is very important that we should know that. If there are some, we should know exactly how they are being treated and whether they will be helped with their removals from one area to another and be given other assistance in relation to that. For example, if they are moved from a rural area in the United Kingdom to London, their expenses will be far greater. If they are moved from England to Scotland, there are important implications in relation to the differences between provisions in one part of this United Kingdom and the other. It would be very helpful if the Minister in his reply can indicate the situation with regard to staff moving between different parts of the United Kingdom.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I fully understand why these amendments are necessary, because we are dealing with the setting-up of a gigantic and very important new authority. The usual problems of pensions and the transfer of staff are major administrative problems and inevitably they always require some adjustment and amendments in legislation.
We are dealing with a rapidly changing world situation and national situation. At this moment, thousands of people are being laid off in the North Sea and North Sea-related firms. The industry is under immense pressure. It has even been described as one of the worst crises facing the North Sea industry since the high days of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Are any of the amendments relevant to this enormously changing scene? What account is being taken, even while we are taking this Bill through Parliament, of the immense blows inflicted on the North Sea by the prospect of far lower oil prices for a long time to come combined with many other difficulties? A newspaper yesterday said:
“North Sea oil producers face a perfect storm”.
There are difficulties and challenges that they have never had to face before. Over the years, costs have been allowed to rise, and suddenly revenues have collapsed. Will the Minister explain what, if any, changes in the Government’s mind were triggered by the fact that we are dealing with a situation that has totally changed since the Bill was first printed and which, if any, of these amendments relate to that? That would be very helpful.
Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke (Lab)
My Lords, it seems to be “Kick the Minister” time, but I do not particularly want to do that, since I know how he feels—I once had to take through a utility Bill that ended up with 1,000 amendments. However, I think everyone would acknowledge that this Bill has been a bit of a dog’s breakfast.
Further to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, the uncertainty facing the North Sea oil and gas industry is considerable at the moment, and there is speculation about perhaps another 10,000 jobs being marked to disappear. I ask the Minister to get some indication of certainty about what is going to happen about the OGA. We cannot go on with this miasma of uncertainty, with changes to amendments and perhaps even further amendments going through to the House of Commons, at a time when there is such a feverish atmosphere around the North Sea.
While I am on the issue of uncertainty, is the Minister aware of the comments by Professor Jacqueline McGlade from the United Nations this morning about the impact of uncertainty on those who are investing? She was talking primarily about the renewables industry, but it also has an impact on oil and gas, particularly in relation to decommissioning.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, although I sometimes agree very much with the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, with her enormous expertise in these fields, on this occasion I have some doubts about the amendment and what it tries to do. We all agree that the scene in the North Sea is changing very rapidly and that there is colossal uncertainty. I do not find any difficulty with the suggestion that the new authority should oversee decommissioning of oil and gas infrastructure. Frankly, there will be a lot more of that. We are already hearing of whole fields being made redundant and major problems of finance with existing operations. That the authority should have oversight of decommissioning oil and gas infrastructure seems to me merely common sense. That will happen anyway.
It is this extra bit that is added on about transportation and storage of greenhouses gases; we need to think very carefully about what we are saying. We are talking about very elaborate and interesting new technologies, which, if they could be developed commercially, would be a godsend, both to the global movement to reduce CO2 emissions and our contribution to it. It would allow the burning of fossil fuels, but in ways that did not emit CO2 and did not damage the climate. But this technology is not very far advanced. It is working in one or two places around the world. Billions have been spent on it, but the difficulties and sheer size of the engineering—of getting pipes into the North Sea and into the redundant oilfields, or areas where enhanced recovery will be enabled by higher pressure, delivered through the injection of CO2—is very much in the future and costs a lot of money.
What is necessary at this stage is to think clearly in terms of the possibilities for the future handling and sequestration of carbon emissions from carbon-generating activities rather than commit the authority to thinking about a particular aspect of it which may, frankly, never become a commercial reality and could impose colossal burdens on an industry in enormous difficulties. I have in mind two technologies. I defer here to the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, who is sitting not very far from me and is a far greater expert on the future handling of CO2. It is, of course, a very valuable gas. Indeed, an article in this morning’s papers by my noble friend Lord Ridley reminds us that, if handled correctly, CO2 has huge potential for improving the climate and our standard of living, bringing greenery to desert areas and encouraging all kinds of industries. One of the two technologies combines CO2 with CO2 already in the atmosphere, the phrase for which escapes me for the moment. It can then be turned very rapidly into carbon, which is an immensely valuable material used in many products. If we can get cheaper carbon, we can make huge advances in all sorts of materials and products and reduce the cost of those products.
The other technology, which again is still in its infancy but is very interesting, enables carbon to be sequestered and transformed into solid forms and eventually be used to produce lime-structured bricks and other building materials. All this obviates the need for pipelines and huge elaborate systems taking this material out into the North Sea into oilfields, former gas fields and other areas. Although it will not necessarily escape as it is not that kind of gas, there are problems with leakage containment in the future, all of which implies huge extra costs on somebody’s part.
I repeat that we are dealing with an industry that is at the moment, frankly, running out of money, is very short of funds and in a contractionary phase, so it would be most unwise to add this additional imposition to the objectives and activities of the authority. It would add to costs and create further uncertainty. We should concentrate on the areas that we know about. Powers exist in the Bill to alter the OGA’s objectives in practical ways according to ministerial requirement, if I am completely wrong and what is now a very remote and expensive technology, involving vast engineering and additional costs, suddenly becomes economic due to some unimagined technical breakthrough. That is always possible, and the Bill has the flexibility to allow for that. We do not need it in this amendment.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, carbon negativity, which the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, has just mentioned, is the concept I was groping for in an earlier amendment and is of course all part of the picture that is emerging: one of several very rapidly changing technologies for handling the carbon issue in ways that may not involve heavy pipelines into redundant oilfields and gas fields in the North Sea or anywhere else. However, that is an aside.
The question I have about this amendment is as follows. I suppose, having criticised the last amendment—our criticisms have been slapped down by the vote of your Lordships’ House and the amendment has been passed—I ought to be consistent and raise an eyebrow about this amendment. Can my noble friend explain why it is necessary and why it is not covered by Clause 4(1) of the Bill? There is an item in it on innovation:
“The need to encourage innovation in technology”.
This is a requirement already in the Bill and seems sufficiently open to allow all the vast variety of new technologies to come along. I have no quarrel with the other amendments from my noble friend about samples and information and I am sure that they are totally right, but this amendment again focuses on carbon emissions and the storage of carbon dioxide in the North Sea. I would just sound a warning note that we are again close to a dangerous tendency to pick winners, something which has led to so much grief and sorrow in the past because it led to a huge waste of resources and delayed the moves that we all want to see towards a more efficient energy industry and one more in line with meeting our climate obligations. Why does subsection (1) of Clause 4 not meet that, and why is the amendment necessary at all? The amendment states at the end that its aim is,
“to meet the target in section 1 of the Climate Change Act 2008”.
That of course is the point. There are many paths to meeting our carbon budget in the climate change obligations. Earlier, I think the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, mentioned the UN official Professor Jacquie McGlade, who was given airspace on the radio this morning about the UK’s energy and climate policy. She seemed to be talking complete nonsense and seemed to believe that renewables targets were more important than our emissions targets, and that subsidising particular renewable technologies, regardless of their contribution to CO2 reduction, was the key aspect of our commitment. That is precisely the trap into which the European Commission and European Energy Commissioners have fallen in the past; namely, trying to lay down the precise pattern of renewables to be backed and not backed. They have been trying to extricate themselves from the mess that they caused by that perception ever since at great cost, with great difficulties and with much uncertainty for the industry. When I see this kind of addition I realise why the Minister has probably put it in.
However, we have some real dangers to avoid. From the previous coalition we have inherited a legacy of considerable confusion, although I admit that I was part of that coalition. We have a legacy in the energy sector which is not at all happy and is leading to considerable ructions and many more difficulties ahead. I will pass over the fact that the targets have not been met at all when one takes into account per capita carbon emissions, let alone the other trilemma targets of affordability and reliability. That is for another debate, but can we please be careful that we leave open the path for all kinds of innovation in the future to meet our climate obligations, and that we do not get trapped into overemphasis on one particular path in order to meet the enthusiasms of those who believe that CCS is essential to be brought into everything? Perhaps it is or perhaps it is not, but let us be careful not to overegg this particular pudding.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My Lords, I want to take up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, with which he reinforced our concern about this Bill being rushed through and consideration not being made. We have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Howell, about whether renewables can be equated with carbon production, which he challenges. As the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, said, these are the kind of things that could be and should be dealt with in pre-legislative scrutiny in the kind of get-together that he suggested.
I am not a fan of this non-elected House. I want to see a move towards a senate of the nations and regions. When we eventually get a Labour Government, we will move in that direction. However, again and again I hear from those who do like this nominated House that we have lots of experts on various subjects, and why do we not make use of them and get them together to provide that experience, insight and knowledge into the legislative process? If we get things rushed through in the way in which this is being rushed through, we are not able to do that.
We saw that again today at Question Time. Members who were present will have heard my intervention when I got really irate concerning the noble Lord, Lord Prior. I think that it was the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, who said that it was not for the first time. The noble Lord seemed to be acting like a disinterested observer of what is happening in social care, which is being reduced enormously, and it was as if he could do nothing about it. He seems to forget that he is a member of the Government who is supposed to report to us and supposed also to take our views back to the Government to try to influence what they do. Ministers are not here just to read out the instructions that they get from the Civil Service and from down the corridor. They are here to listen to what Members of the House of Lords say, to take account of it and to pass it on. To be fair to the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, as my noble friend Lady Worthington said, he has taken account of some of the specific aspects that have been raised. But there are others that have been overlooked and I fear that there will be others that will be overlooked. I hope that I am proved wrong on Wednesday and that some account will be taken.
The noble Lord, Lord Howell, is about to disappear but I think even he would agree that, if not a direct equation between CO2 emissions and renewables, renewables have a high correlation between their development and their expansion, and the reduction of CO2. Not every renewable energy source is perfect and does not have some carbon emissions in the production of the equipment that it uses and so on, but producing this clean energy must be considered much better than the alternatives and all the ones that we have had in the past.
Incidentally, I should have declared an interest right at the start; I did so on previous occasions. I am a trustee and treasurer of the Climate Parliament. We argue very strongly at every opportunity we have in every parliament around the world to try to ensure that all countries, including the United Kingdom, are doing as much as possible to reduce carbon emissions.
Before I ask a specific question, I must say that the Minister is an eloquent man. As a Welshman, he is, like me, grieving at what happened over the last few days with the rugby results; in our case we were cheated out of a great victory. I have had dealings with him before he became a Minister and I have great respect for him, but even he, with all his Welsh eloquence, cannot argue that there has not been a deep depression in the renewable energy sector with what has happened over the last few months in solar energy—where we have seen and are seeing job losses because of the cutbacks—and now in onshore wind. We will talk more on this on Wednesday.
I ask the Minister one particular question: tomorrow we will hear the wit and wisdom of the President of China. It has been suggested that we should make all sorts of representations to him on human rights and discuss with him a range of issues concerning trade and co-operation in a variety of fields. Specifically, will we talk with him about energy in general, and in particular about the Green Grid alliance? At the United Nations, the Chinese President said that he is in favour of a global energy network for clean energy. The Chinese corporation dealing with this has put a lot of resources and thinking into developing a grid that takes energy from areas where it is produced cheaply and regularly, such as the deserts where solar energy is produced, and channelling it through a green grid to areas where it is used and needed.
I hope that at some point in his visit, Ministers—if not the Prime Minister—will raise with the Chinese President how the United Kingdom Government can co-operate with the Chinese Government on this. They are very far-thinking. They have great resources, a great number of people and great knowledge. I hope that we will pursue this with them, that we will take the opportunity to raise it with him when he is here and follow it up in the weeks and months to come.
Energy Bill [HL]
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I would like to resume. I was thinking ahead to Paris in the week beginning 7 December, wondering which poor Minister—I hope it is not the noble Lord, Lord Bourne—is going to have to go there and explain how we are going to manage to achieve our targets for reducing carbon emissions by the appropriate date, given what we are doing in relation to solar energy, and now in relation to onshore wind. I certainly would not like to be doing that.
In the light of the fact that there has been this betrayal and that the Government are trying to rush us through some very complicated and detailed amendments with serious long-term effects that will affect not just investors, customers and suppliers but many more people, I must give the Minister notice that I am minded to oppose all his amendments in this Grand Committee unless he can give me some very clear assurances. I will be listening very carefully. If we do not agree this today, it will give the Government another week to try to get it right.
I ask the Minister to go back to his Secretary of State and his other Ministers and ask whether it is really worth the candle to push this through the House of Lords and then go to the House of Commons and try to persuade it, with 55 SNP Members of Parliament snapping away at Ministers’ heels, just for the relatively small amount that it would cost to go ahead as originally planned, and for the relatively small amount of generation involved? Is it really worth pushing ahead with that?
I wonder whether the Government are now regretting having introduced this Bill into the House of Lords. We are supposed to deal with Bills that are not contentious but this one is proving very contentious indeed. The Minister should go back and explain the problems that he is having getting the Bill through the House of Lords and warn his colleagues that it is going to be not just twice or 10 times as hard but many times more difficult to get it through the House of Commons. The Government have a majority there but there are all sorts of ways that it can be upset. I hope that he will consider changing his mind, withdrawing Clause 66 completely, finding some better arrangement that protects onshore wind schemes and keeping the three promises that I mentioned earlier, which the Government have reneged upon. I give him that very serious warning. Perhaps he will reflect that if he had taken my advice to have this matter dealt with in the Chamber, he might not be in the pickle he is in now.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests, including as president of the Energy Industries Council, which I cease to be tomorrow evening so I shall not need to declare it after that.
I applaud the very balanced assessment of the situation given by the noble Baroness, Lady Quin. It reflected very sensible views about the way this issue should be handled and approached. As for the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, perhaps he was not in the Chamber at Second Reading, or if he was he seems to have completely forgotten what I said about Hinkley Point. I am very pro-nuclear indeed, but I do not mind saying in front of my noble friend that I have very serious reservations about whether the Hinkley Point C programme is the right way to get our nuclear renaissance going. I just remind him of that before he makes a further comment.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I apologise for forgetting that. I was only recollecting what he said in the Chamber this afternoon. I accept that he made that point previously.
Lord Howell of Guildford
I thank the noble Lord for that. Turning to the amendments, they are very generous and I congratulate my noble friend on bringing them forward, even though they are rather extensive. They are what we used to call in the other place “liquid legislation”; that is, legislation going through Parliament that all the time is massively amended so that it changes from day to day. The amendments are indeed extensive but also very generous. This is a very exciting industry, part of the great low-carbon renewables transformation in the world that most of us want to see. All around the world, costs not only for solar power, which we were discussing earlier in the Chamber, but for all forms of wind power, onshore and offshore, and all sorts of other associated technologies are coming down dramatically. Really amazing technological advances are being achieved.
I listened to the expert legal commentaries of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and I am all for speeding up the planning. However, it has to be remembered that what we are doing here is not legislating to stop all onshore wind. That is a vast industry that will continue and contribute to the energy transformation of the entire planet. What we are legislating for is to bring to a halt, with the various adjustments embodied in the amendments, further subsidy that falls upon consumers. This has to be weighed in the balance. We hear horrid stories about the closure of businesses; the Redcar steelworks is perhaps the most dramatic recent one. When you look at the small print, you find that one of the difficulties is that they are facing much cheaper imports from countries that are not carrying such heavy energy costs. We have to put that in the balance and not just ignore the other side of the argument. There are consumers and taxpayers, often poor households and consumers with very low incomes, at the other end of this process, and we cannot ignore their position.
In addition, it has to be remembered that many of the investors behind the projects we are talking about have not just entered into them entirely from the goodness of their hearts or because they want to save the planet. Investors enter into these great projects because they can make a profit, and I have nothing against that; that is excellent. Less excellent, however, is that they sometimes enter into them because the subsidies seem so juicy and attractive and they think that they are going to make exceptionally large profits. So I just say to my noble friend, and I am sure he would agree, that we should bring to an end—with these many concessions and in a very balanced way—this particular growth of additional subsidies. In future, let us make sure that investors in these industries understand, as I believe the wise ones do, that the projects that they want to go for are the ones that are really likely to be extremely profitable, particularly in Scotland, and very competitive with all other forms of energy. They should be careful if they think that they are just going to ride on an indefinite continuation of very large subsidies because Governments and policies change. Wise advisers to wise investors will always warn them that the best projects are those for which the subsidies are a minimal part of the reward, and the profitable and efficient operation of the industry itself, and the rapid adaption of new technology, are the larger part of the profit generated. In every case, we advise that subsidies can end.
Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, in discussing these amendments, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves of the enormous success of the system which the Government and their predecessor put into place. The fact that these prices have fallen significantly is in part—indeed, in very strong part—due to the encouragement that this Government and the previous Government have brought to play. Sometimes, we talk as if all this technological advantage has just happened because people have been clever. Actually, it has not: a market was created. Certainly, the successes of offshore wind have been achieved because people had a proper market, with a proper continuum, and were therefore able to invest.
I declare an interest as chairman of the Committee on Climate Change. Although I have to sit on one side or the other, that makes me entirely independent on these issues. The fact that we can talk about offshore wind being competitive now, in a way that we had never thought of, is entirely the result of the foresight of all three political parties in various assemblies putting this opportunity in place. Let us not just say that the technology has improved so wonderfully that it is now in this new position; it is actually a very good example of the relationship between government and the provision of opportunity by others. Any new technology has to compete in a world where there are enormous advantages for old technologies, because of the investment they had in the past and a whole range of subsidies that happen throughout the world. That is certainly true of the fossil fuel industries.
I point next to the fact that one of the reasons why the cost has risen is that these technologies are actually more efficient than we ever thought they were going to be. When the Committee on Climate Change proposed that it would cost us some £7.6 billion to ensure that we were on track to decarbonise our electricity supply, and therefore on track for meeting our statutory requirement to reduce our emissions by 80% by the year 2050, the then coalition Government accepted that amount. It is actually costing more than that, partly because of the fall in the gas price. The gas price affects this because of course a contract for difference takes place, so when the price of gas falls the additional cost comes back. However, it is also partly because offshore wind is immensely more efficient than we thought it would be. It is putting more energy into the grid, which costs us more because that is the deal we have done. So the background to these amendments is one of success, not failure. We are not having to do this because it has cost us more by being a failure; it is because it has been a success.
The amendments seem to go a very long way towards meeting the one legitimate argument that needs to be faced: the reasonable expectation on the part of business that if it invests, it will get certain advantages from the Government. The Committee on Climate Change is primarily concerned not with means but with ends. We are concerned with delivering the budgets to which the Government and Parliament are committed. Frankly, Governments have every right to make changes if they want to, as long as the changes end up in such a place that we are able to meet the requirements of the carbon budgets laid down by Parliament as a result of the recommendations of the Committee on Climate Change. So I am very leery of being led into a position of saying that this or that mechanism is the right one. However, I have to say that it is very important that business should not get the impression that promises made are broken.
That does not mean to say that if you subsidise people now, you will always be subsidising them. That is not true. Sometimes, when I listen to some of the green organisations, you would have thought that the moment you promise to do something, you are then going to do it for ever, and that somehow you are letting people down if you do not. That is also not so. All I am saying here is that there are two different issues. On the one hand is the right and ability of the Government to alter, extend or restrict the subsidy that they offer in the light of changed circumstances and, on the other, the duty of the Government to ensure that they meet fully the obligations into which they have entered.
Renewable Energy: Solar
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, I repeat that the consultation is still very much open. It is true that social housing and community projects—the noble Lord referred to a school—look to feed-in tariffs as a reliable source of revenue. That is why the review specifically seeks views on this. I encourage the noble Lord to feed in to that review and to others.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, is it not worth explaining that there has to be a limit to the amount that the taxpayer and the consumer is prepared to put in to subsidise these important renewable industries? Would it not be the best advice to future investors and firms in this area to seek to develop their technologies without subsidy, as is happening in other parts of the world?
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, keeping bills down for hard-working families obviously is a vital part of the Government’s policy—and it very much remains so. It is true that the costs of solar and of other renewables are falling significantly. Solar is on the fastest trajectory downwards. We are very keen to reduce the cost of solar panels by, for example, supporting lifting the ban on minimum price restrictions on the import of solar panels from China into the EU, as we are doing.
Energy Bill [HL]
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on whether keeping this clause in the Bill is sensible. I share his views entirely about the vagaries of the local planning system. It is true to say—it would be good if the Minister could confirm it at some stage—that not only are there not many neighbourhood plans in existence, but some local authorities have not yet published local plans, far less had them accepted. This provision might be okay in places where they have thought about it, but so many have not and show no signs of doing so.
The National Planning Policy Framework only encourages local planning authorities to consider identifying suitable areas for renewable energy sources and as a result the links in the chain that could fail are rather long. A local authority might not have got to the stage where it had a local plan and therefore there cannot be neighbourhood plans, because they have got to be in a consistent process with the local plan, and there is only a vague nudge in the direction of considering whether suitable areas have been identified for renewable energy. It does not feel like a well-honed local set of circumstances for fostering that vital and, as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, pointed out, cost-effective way of meeting some very stringent climate change targets and budgets. I have concerns about the removal of the Secretary of State’s consent in this respect.
It is rather strange that we are moving in one direction for fracking consents and in another for onshore wind consents. I simply make that remark without having any belief that there should be one without the other. I must confess that I need to meet my noble friend Lady Worthington to talk about some impacts of fracking other than simply energy generation, carbon reduction and cost.
There is one other issue in respect of the localisation of decision-making in terms of onshore wind, which is how we get some strategic perspective. It is going to be abominably difficult to meet our carbon targets, and we will need every tool in the toolkit to do so. In this clause, there is no mechanism for that happening on a scale larger than a neighbourhood or local plan, yet many of these decisions involving technologies other than onshore wind need to be part of the mix on a local and national basis for these decisions to be looked at on a more strategic basis at a higher level than the local planning authority.
I hope that the Minister will come back to us with answers to some of the questions we are raising about the advisability of removing the Secretary of State’s permission.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I, too, am waiting for my noble friend Lord Ridley to give his limpid views on the future of onshore wind and, indeed, on the role of onshore and offshore wind power in the tasks of reducing emissions worldwide and producing a balanced energy policy for the British people. No doubt he will enter into later debates on the next clause which will cover very much the same ground.
I admire the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for his frank admission of the dilemma he faces. On the one hand, localism is the flavour of the month, the year and the time, and there is a great desire to move from central administration in every area of policy, certainly including energy, into a greater role for local people, local planning and local authorities, yet he is also worried about inconsistency and fears that in some way the onshore wind cause is being abandoned. I do not see that. If you look at the proposals and the argument in the impact assessments behind the Bill, it is perfectly clear that, first, onshore wind has had a fantastic run over recent years. Some would say it was possibly too big a run given the very considerable economic advantages it brought to many wealthy individuals, gigantic corporations and energy companies and to those who are benefiting in all sorts of other ways from the proceeds and the subsidies, which are, of course, paid for by the consumer. In many cases, we know it is the poor consumer, and it is certainly the competitive consumer in industry. It is clear that subsidies have created this great growth. There must be a limit, as has been set quite clearly by government, and it is going to be exceeded unless the brakes are put on. There is a limit in two senses: first, the sheer weight of subsidy required to maintain the industry until it can get its costs down. I will come to that in a moment because there are real problems in getting costs down.
Secondly, there is managing a balanced grid system which can absorb the intermittency of wind. Every country that has gone into this business in a big way—Denmark is a good example—has found enormous difficulties. That is one reason why Denmark wants to have an interconnector with Britain for electricity. Intermittently there will be no charge at all for the electricity it supplies to us because it is a danger to it and an advantage to us. Spain has found enormous difficulties in going too fast and beyond the limits of engineering and electronic management in organising its grid when the wind blows too hard or too regularly.
Thirdly, there is the intermittency problem, which we all face. One day we will get over it because the storage will come at lower costs and intermittency problems will be much reduced. In the mean time, though, intermittency requires back-up, and back-up requires gas. There are other devices but gas-generated electricity is the area where most people in Europe, certainly in this country, think the gap can be filled. Far from being inconsistent, then, it seems to me utterly consistent that at this point the contribution of onshore wind should be restrained in the ways that are proposed.
As for the emissions angle, we know that we are driven by the European requirements for renewable energy, the formidable target of 15% of our energy from renewable sources by, I think, 2020, and Europe’s target of 40% by 2030. It is quite clear from the present pattern that we are not going to meet that target, and that even if we were to double the onshore wind power we still would not get near it, even if we took into account merely the emissions that emerge from the production of energy. In fact, the emissions that emerge from our capital consumption of energy per head, and from all the vast imports that we suck into this country from countries with much lower standards with very high emission content, have not fallen very much at all; indeed, many would argue that they have increased greatly since 1990.
So the real problem is that the present policy is not actually working. Those of us who are concerned about climate change look at what is happening throughout Europe, notice the contrary tendencies in delivering emission reduction—much more coal burning and a failure of the heavy concentration of wind around the islands, like the one that we are living on—and ask whether we should not begin to think about an entirely new and different policy. I see no inconsistency at all. No doubt we will debate this a little further on in the afternoon in more depth and detail.
I worked very closely with my friends in the Liberal Democrats in the last Government and enjoyed doing so, but I find their stance on this almost impossible to understand. They seem to be favouring a system that does not do much for emissions, distributes money in massive ways from the poor to the rich and apparently produces all kinds of tax advantages that are going to be exploited. This is one irony of the situation: even with this restraint, it looks to me as though we are going to have continuous investment in onshore wind, even without the subsidies, because of the big tax advantages that are built into the system. Should we not be looking at those before we take a position on the question of local powers and so on?
It is a puzzle to me that we do not look in a more balanced way at what is being done. It seems utterly consistent. I do not think that I want to be a supporter of anything that promotes further a system that is unfair to the poorest people and consumers, and which delivers considerable tax advantages to clever people and yet does not do very much at all for emission reduction. It seems to me to be a sad mixture, and it is about time that it was changed.
Baroness Worthington (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for introducing this clause stand part debate, and to noble Lords who have contributed to it. I shall make a few comments. As we enter the third day of Committee, I am grateful to the Minister for having agreed to extend the Committee for an extra day. I think that this has arisen because we felt—I have probably made myself fairly clear on this—that the handling of the Bill has been slightly suboptimal, and we are expecting more amendments to come to us before Report. We are very grateful that we now have an opportunity to discuss those in Committee before then.
Today we move on to Part 4, which it is fair to say is the more controversial aspect. People on both sides of the Committee may have different views about the benefits or disbenefits of particular technologies, but we must strive to ensure that we have a good policy and governance regime that will help investors not to waste their money. One of our concerns is that any manifesto, no matter how good the drafters, is prepared relatively hastily and usually without a great deal of thought for the detail. Yet here we are, just months after that manifesto was put into print, hastily enacting some of the statements in it and I think that we are still lacking some of the detail.
Viscount Ridley
My Lords, I kept my powder dry on the general points until now, which ran the risk that some of the points I would like to make have been made, particularly by my noble friend Lord Howell, and very eloquently. I would like to encourage the Minister to stick to the manifesto promise to get rid of onshore wind subsidies, to stand up for consumers and not to do the bidding of what is, effectively, a crony capitalist industry addicted to state subsidies.
The Government wish to pursue decarbonisation without making energy either unaffordable or insecure. We have heard this many times as the principle behind both the Government’s and the Opposition’s stance, but, like the Minister, I am curious to know what the Opposition’s stance will be after this weekend. Wind simply does not help in this regard; it is not solving the trilemma at all. It is putting up energy costs, reducing energy security and failing to make a significant dent in emissions.
The fact is that the increased onshore wind production of recent years has failed to make any measurable reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, due to significant, intractable problems of intermittency, location and energy density. We know that the best way of cutting emissions is for gas to replace coal and, indeed, for coal to go to supra-critical use, which is much more efficient. That is not happening in this country because nobody wants to invest in new up-to-date combined cycle gas because wind is dumped on to the system at zero marginal cost. As a result, no new CCGTs are being built because the economics of operating them has been destroyed. I challenge those who support these amendments to give me a number in tonnes or percentages of emissions that have been reduced as a result of the wind power that has rolled out already. I cannot find such a number and it is impossible to say that it is significant at all.
I, too, like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, had a letter from a wind company saying that wind energy is clean, affordable and secure. I am sorry, but I do not think it is any of those things. It is not true to say that it is cheap. The industry keeps saying that it is the cheapest form of renewable energy, but that is wrong. We know hydro is cheaper, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, said.
Besides, a lot of the cost of onshore wind is still hidden. The Department of Energy and Climate Change has not used a total-systems approach in its cost modelling. In other words, it does not factor in the costs of transmission, grid integration, back-up during periods of intermittency, and so forth. The department appears to understand this as it has recently commissioned Frontier Economics to undertake a study into the true costs of energy generation by wind. It would be wise for the Government to wait for the outcome of this research before providing any more financial support to onshore wind.
The wind industry is, as my noble friend Lord Howell said, a Hood Robin industry: it takes money disproportionately from the poor, for whom energy bills are a larger proportion of spending, and gives it largely to the rich, in the form of landowners or investors. A lot of the money in wind is sheltering from inheritance tax through business property relief, as we learnt in this morning’s papers, which is something only rich people need to do. Does the Minister share my amazement that this monster of regressive redistribution was invented by Ed Miliband, encouraged by the Lib Dems and may or may not be supported by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party? This is yet another case where the Conservatives are standing up for ordinary people, while the left looks after the interests of the metropolitan rich.
It is just not true to say that onshore wind is clean. True, it emits no smoke or effluent here, but the rare earth metals in a wind turbine’s magnets, roughly a tonne of neodymium per turbine, are mined and refined in China in one of the most polluting industries on earth, and the steel in the turbine’s tower can only be made using coal.
We have not solved the problem of adding an intermittent source of supply to the electricity grid. The very large amounts of wind generation currently being added to the system are not solving the security problem. In fact, they are the problem. In other words, the greater the percentage of electricity from wind in the system, the more some other kind of quick-response generation is needed, and this often means keeping old, fossil-fuel stations going.
It is worth reiterating that the Secretary of State has confirmed that the UK has enough onshore wind projects in the pipeline to meet the 2020 renewables targets, so there is no need to offer any further financial incentives.
Finally, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and, with respect to the previous amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said that the wind industry needs certainty. Like me, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, is a farmer. Farmers would have loved some certainty about the wheat price earlier this year. It plummeted, and we had no warning at all. To argue that this industry peculiarly needs certainty when others do not is not fair. Once a subsidy is in place, it should be possible to withdraw it. Otherwise, if we say that we are going to withdraw a subsidy, people will always respond that they have not had time to adjust to that. I hope the Minister will confirm that he will stand firm against this attempt to keep electricity more expensive, more unreliable and probably no less carbon-intensive.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, I declare my interests, as I did on earlier days in Committee, as president of the Energy Industries Council, chairman of the Windsor Energy Group and adviser to industries and investors concerned with energy as in the register. I echo what the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, said earlier. The noble Lord, Lord Bourne, has been exceptionally helpful in the way he has circulated and kept us all up to date with the evolution of government thinking. I realise that this is a changing situation, and even when we have finished with this legislation, we will be looking at further changes in the pattern of energy and energy support, and in world, European and national perceptions of how best to move towards meeting the challenge of climate change and lowering emissions globally, which is itself a matter of constant debate.
The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, was right to say that investors need certainty. Of course they do. Investors always long for maximum certainty, minimum risk and nice returns. That is nirvana for investors, but when investors or their advisers are dealing with projects and commitments of finance that depend on government support and state subsidy, a certain degree of sagacity and caution is called for. I make a distinction between specific projects where one of the partners is the state or the Government. They must go forward in a legalised, contractual form and should not be departed from. It would be an appalling act of arbitrary sequestration for such things to change. It has happened, I am afraid, but it is not something I wish to see from a British Government. One expects the funds that have been promised by Governments to be given.
When it comes to a commitment to an apparently unending pattern of subsidy heading into the future, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, reminded us that the coalition Government had an idea that this sort of subsidy should end. When it comes to investing in something where you will depend on the continual supply of taxpayers’ money, sensible investors ought to be very cautious. Governments change, as my noble friend reminded us, and technological changes change the basis on which the original subsidy policy was evolved. Moods change, and—dare I say it?—even science changes. I would not go as far as Cardinal Wolsey, who lay on his deathbed saying, “Put not your trust in princes”, but there has to be a sensible assessment when an investment is profitable simply because taxpayers’ money is promised to it for a long period into the future. There has to be a sensible assessment by the investor, the entrepreneur and the project organiser of how it is going to stand up and how big a risk is being taken. It may be that people see that they can pop in with short-term investments and hope to get out before the policy changes, but that does happen, and a certain realism is required. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, that ideally all investors would love total certainty about their returns for ever, regardless of the source.
The noble Lords who gave notice of their intention to oppose Clause 60 standing part of the Bill want subsidies to go on or feel that they should not have been curtailed in the way they have been, even though, as my noble friend Lord Ridley pointed out, the pipeline is full, which is language for saying that the amount of subsidy element that has been assigned for this has reached its peak in terms of political reality, common sense and our obligations, whether imposed through our Climate Change Act or through conformity with European objectives. Noble Lords think the subsidy is gone, but my question is: when will the subsidies cease? If this is a mature industry, at what point does a mature industry cease to need a very substantial degree of subsidy, quite regardless of the point we made earlier that the subsidy tends to end up in very well-lined pockets and costs a lot for those who can least afford it? As my noble friend Lord Ridley said, onshore wind electricity is still expensive. It is true that it is not expensive compared with offshore, but when you add in the roads, the system costs, the requirements for integration and balancing in a very complicated electricity system and all the other items that my noble friend itemised, we are not talking about cheap electricity. One day, it may be so; one day, onshore, and possibly offshore, will be able to get costs down to competitive rates, possibly to lower rates than anything that is likely to come out of the latest nuclear project from EDF at Hinkley, which has an enormously high rate for 35 years to come. I hope that long before then wind power electricity will be considerably cheaper than anything that EDF is planning, but that still will not make it cheap. We are heading for a major glut in gas production; we can already see that from the fall in oil prices. As gas prices are related to oil prices, the barrel of oil equivalent of the gas price will, for many years to come, be not at all expensive and probably low. Compared with all that, these renewable sources, which have their place, which must contribute and which I support, will remain expensive. In other words, someone has to pay for them.
Lastly, the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, has alleged, I think along with others, that there is a contrast between the need to restrain further subsidies—not to halt the development of onshore wind, because if it can get its costs down and, as I mentioned earlier, if many investors believe that they see tax advantages in it, it will go on, even if the subsidies are withdrawn and we close off the renewables obligation completely— and the Government’s attitudes to fracking. I hardly dare mention fracking because almost anything one says in this very controversial area gets wildly distorted. If fracking proceeds in the UK—I say “if” because oil is at $50 and likely to become lower, with many people now talking about $25 and $30—the investment attraction of gas or oil extraction by hydraulic fracturing will, frankly, not be great. It could become an additional gas source to the many already available to us. There is LNG, obviously, and Norway is willing to pipe us a lot more gas, while even the Russians want to sell us gas direct through their Nord Stream pipeline extension. If all those ifs fall into place, we will have gas.
Energy Bill [HL]
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, following the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, perhaps I may take the opportunity of this amendment to thank my noble friend the Minister for circulating overnight the impact assessment, which we have all read with interest. It does seem to have a discouragingly large number of “Not availables” in various boxes throughout, which rather puts one off. However, I can see that my noble friend has made a considerable effort and I am grateful to him.
The impact assessment states that last January the Oil and Gas Authority began to undertake an urgent piece of work involving industry to come up with practical measures to mitigate the immediate risks that the downturn in oil and gas prices present. That is a high ambition, but we open the papers each morning and read of thousands of redundancies, talk of fields closing down and a real sense of crisis beginning to envelope the industry, as the oil price for Brent crude remains resolutely down at around $50 and much lower for West Texas Intermediate. Can we be assured that as we go through this stage and the Report stage that we have a little more meat on the description of what these practical measures are and how, as the sense of crisis develops, it is going to be mitigated by the work and the powers we are assigning to the Oil and Gas Authority? I think that a new sense of urgency is coming to the debate which may not have been the case in January or when the new authority was set up, but we now need to incorporate that as we handle the legislation that is necessary to send the authority on its way.
Baroness Maddock (LD)
My Lords, I am delighted to hear that some noble Lords have received the impact assessment, but I wonder if the Minister can tell me how it was distributed, because it has not come my way yet.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, I take it that the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, is referring to the very interesting paper put forward by Professor Stuart Haszeldine and his colleagues about the financing and development of CCS. The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, is himself always at the forefront of new thinking and developments in this important area, and this is certainly a very interesting set of thoughts. Basically, the idea in the paper, as I understand it, is to spread the costs of further CCS development away from falling exclusively on the already burdened consumer and also to spread them through time. The argument is that, as we get to the end of the 2020s and into the 2030s, the real crunch and crisis over CO2 will come and that the burning of coal particularly is going to become absolutely decisive in shaping future influence on climate change.
Furthermore, the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, is absolutely right about the centrality that he gives to the whole carbon capture and storage task. When one considers that 2,117 new coal plants are now being planned or built around the world, one begins to realise the enormity of the task to somehow ensure either that they are diverted or that the coal plants operate in ways that reduce carbon emissions. Carbon capture and storage clearly is the most satisfactory technical answer to that, although there are problems of cost, but there are of course much cleaner ways of burning coal, which both the Chinese and the Poles are urging, using very advanced technology built on the conventional platform but also supercritical boilers and other devices to ensure that much more energy emerges from a tonne of coal. That way, by definition, you get more energy or electricity out of a coal-fired station but save on the amount of emissions that would otherwise result. So there are other techniques as well, which are obviously decisive.
Most coal stations will be built in India, Indonesia and Turkey—mostly in Asia, although some in Europe. The whole attempt effectively to keep global warming to a 2 degrees centigrade rise will stand or fall on what happens to that vast number of new coal stations and the huge commitment to increased coal burn. It is the official policy of the Government of India that there must be a doubling of coal production and a very substantial increase in coal burning there, because the primary aim is the reduction of poverty and economic development. Unfortunately, given the economics of the present and near future, coal is much the cheapest way to produce the essential cheap power that developing nations of that size and with those challenges must have.
This is the problem. The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, and the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, are absolutely right to call our attention to this, but the question left in my mind is how relevant it is to the extraction of oil and gas in the North Sea. If we are to carry forward experiments effectively, we need to develop the storage techniques that go hand-in-hand with carbon capture and storage. That is very important and there is a lot of work to be done on that.
I will strike a slightly diversionary note from what has been said in the debate so far. The aim here is maximum economic recovery. The aim is to cope with an industry which is shrinking very rapidly. On the front page of the Times this morning I read that 65,000 jobs are about to go in the industry. The industry is under very great pressure. As I understand it, our aim in the Bill and that of the OGA is to ensure that gas and oil are extracted economically, commercially and successfully in these shrinking conditions. We know that gas is considerably lower carbon when burnt than coal, so if we are trying to sequester our coal carbon emissions or move from coal to gas, it is more gas we want, not less. Everything needs to be done—as I understand the OGA is trying to do—to encourage the extraction at economic prices of gas from the North Sea that can then be burnt, thereby saving considerable carbon emissions. We need to copy the American example, where there has been a huge reduction in carbon emissions—at least on the production side; consumption is another story, of course—because they have switched from coal to gas as a result not of government policy but of the shale revolution.
I leave a question mark over the amendment as to whether it really applies as directly as some have suggested to the North Sea offshore operations. It is clearly vital that something is done to halt the massive increase in coal burn lying ahead. I think that 46% of the entire world’s electricity comes from coal, and that is probably rising, not falling. That is decisive, but whether at this stage the additional obligations in the Bill should be placed on this particular industry, which is struggling in desperately difficult conditions in both a geographic and an economic and commercial sense, I am not so sure. I end my comments with this question, although it may be that this is not quite the right place to think about this vital issue.
Lord Teverson
My Lords, I am a great disappointment to the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, because over the years, I have become a CCS sceptic in all sorts of ways. The reason for that is not because it is not necessary or a good way to move forward the decarbonisation agenda but because, exactly as he himself said—I have been talking about this for the nine years that I have been privileged to be a Member of this House—we have got a very short distance in terms of making it happen. Obviously there has been important progress, with projects in the formative pipeline at the moment, but one reason for that is that CCS is large scale, demonstration projects are very expensive and it stands aside from the fossil fuel-based industry that it is trying to help. The two are not directly tied up.
What I like about the amendment, and why I have put my name to it, is that it tries to find a number of ways through that puzzle. First, it says that CCS is important, and is a future technology. I really welcome the Government’s positive messages about this. From where I stand, the decarbonisation agenda seems to be rather on the back foot and going in the wrong direction, but in this important area I really welcome the Government’s positive mood music. But there are a couple of other things. One was referred to strongly and effectively by the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. If there is greater stakeholdership of CCS by the fossil fuel industry, there is likely to be more push for there to be a real effect and for something to happen. It is also an ongoing basis on which this technology can be funded, rather than on the erratic one-off mega-subsidies and funding systems that we have at the moment.
For those reasons, this is a really positive suggestion and a way in which we can start to move forward. It is also in line with the philosophy, with which we all agree, that the polluter pays—or it is in that ballpark, if not absolutely perfectly. For that reason, I was very pleased to put my name to the amendment, as it helps to bring that forward. But as other noble Lords have said, clearly this is the start of an idea. That is why it is absolutely right that the amendment talks about a consultation process, rather than saying that it should happen. So I very much welcome this amendment and welcome the Government’s positive view towards CCS, and I hope that this can be seen as a way of moving this agenda forward more practically than we have achieved in the past.
Energy Bill [HL]
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Worthington
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response and for chasing the impact assessment. Can I take it that the full impact assessment will be published tomorrow, or will it be just the oil and gas part? Perhaps he could clarify that point for me.
Looking at Clause 2, our Amendment 1 is essentially a probing amendment but it is intended to enable us to debate this part of the Bill. At Second Reading, several noble Lords raised the fact that things are changing fast in the North Sea and in the oil and gas sector more generally. We have an undertaking to implement the findings of the Wood review and I am sure the cross-party consensus on that remains strong. However, the Wood review was published in June 2013. Here we are in September 2015 and the pace of change since that date has been quite remarkable.
We are seeing a steady decline in North Sea production. Outputs of oil and gas are already around 40% lower than in 2010 and lower than at any time since 1977. The first quarter of this year marked the seventh consecutive month in which the UK has been a net importer of petroleum, after having been a net exporter since 1984. The figures for 2014 show that the oil and gas sector as a whole lost £5.2 billion—its worst figure since the 1970s—and total revenues were lower than at any time since 1998 at £24 billion. I quote these figures, which were sourced from DECC’s own analysis, to highlight how things are changing in this sector and in the North Sea specifically.
The other new element is that decommissioning is now a reality and is starting to incur costs. There was a feeling a few years ago that decommissioning was the beginning of the end. Now it is being seen as the beginning of a new industry and there is considerable decommissioning activity going on, not least because many of these assets have been in place for decades, perhaps well beyond their imagined timespan. They are therefore reaching the end of their usable lives, even if we wished to keep using them. The purpose of the amendment, then, is to ask for a report to Parliament on the fitness of the powers now being created for the OGA. We have suggested that it should be produced within six months but we do not have a fixed view; a year would be equally fine. However, we must make sure that we set off on the creation of this new quango or arm’s-length body with the right set of objectives.
We will debate amendments later today where we will talk more about the need to update the objectives, particularly in relation to the storage and transportation of waste greenhouse gases. It seems clear that, as we look at the implications of climate change, which are now uncontested—I think it is settled that we need to decarbonise our energy systems—that will change the economics of all fossil fuel activity. If we are to meet our targets, either we will be forced to decarbonise our use of fossil fuels using CCS or we will see a drastic reduction in the demand for those products. Either of those has significant implications for the UK economy and for the oil and gas sector, hence the desire to table an amendment that enables us to have this debate and to require that the OGA be kept up to date with the most recent developments in this sector.
As I have said, oil and gas prices have fallen and there seems to be no sign of their coming back up again any time soon—of course these prices fluctuate but this now seems to be a systemic drop—so we must have a body with the right remit and objectives to do the job of making sure that, while we maximise the economic return from the North Sea, we accept that this may not be solely through the recovery of hydrocarbons but might, of necessity, require a completely new industry that not only extracts hydrocarbons but returns the waste gases to under the sea. We are blessed with a natural repository for many billions of tonnes of waste greenhouse gases, which I am certain we will need if we want to keep the costs of decarbonisation under control and ensure that we are decarbonising cost-effectively.
I shall speak also to Amendment 3 in this group. Amendment 1 requires a report to be made on the fitness of purpose of these powers, but Amendment 3 is more specific and seeks to change the primary objectives of the OGA to include CO2 transportation and storage. It would negate the need for many of the subsequent amendments that we will talk about today because it would bring about a high-level change which would mean that we would not have to catch lots of subsequent clauses and add references to CCS and storage and transportation to the powers being taken here. Many amendments that we will come to today relate to how, as drafted, there is reference back to the principal objective of the Bill and the fact that currently that principal objective does not include the transportation and storage of CO2. Therefore, many of the amendments are trying to reinsert it. We could take another approach, such as the one set out in Amendment 3, which is simply to change the primary objective. There is merit in our discussing that, particularly as CCS offers a lifeline for the future development of hydrocarbon use in the UK by being able largely to decarbonise our use of those fuels.
CCS is essential in that it will enable us to keep using hydrocarbons but, as I alluded to earlier, it is equally important to keeping the costs of decarbonisation contained. At the global level, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that if we do not have CCS on a global scale, we are likely to see the costs of decarbonisation being double what they would be otherwise, while in the UK the Energy Technologies Institute has estimated that without CCS, by 2050 the costs of decarbonising to reach our targets could be in the order of £40 billion to £50 billion a year more than if CCS is deployed.
This is an important and timely subject. We are seeing projects in the UK moving forward to deployment to enable us to make use of the North Sea. I am sure that the OGA will say, “We would rather have our remit nice and narrow; please leave us alone”. That is fine, but we are moving to a time when the social contract between the citizens and taxpayers of the UK and the offshore oil and gas operators is changing. The oil and gas industry largely used to get on with what it was doing—delivering us rather nice, large sources of tax revenue—and everyone was happy. That is shifting. The revenues are falling, as we have seen in recent years, decommissioning costs are rising and the OGA itself, as we will come to debate later this afternoon, will potentially receive public funding to go about its business. This is no longer purely a commercially focused sector and it requires government to intervene to help it. It has the opportunity to receive public funding—the oil and gas operators already receive generous tax breaks that enable them to offset their decommissioning costs. The social licence between us, the citizens of the UK, and the offshore oil and gas operators is shifting. We need to make sure that the OGA reflects that change of balance and takes on a role fit for the 21st century.
We should always consider very carefully when we create new public sector costs. The Government have pointed out on numerous occasions that we are living through a time of austerity, and it seems a bit strange that we should be creating a new area of public spending here without requiring this to be a comprehensive body that takes into account a whole range of views and issues and keeps pace with current events. As good as it was, the Wood review—which I am sure will continue to receive cross-Bench support—is over two years old, and two years has been shown to be quite a long time in the oil and gas sector, hence the need for these two amendments. I look forward to the Minister’s response and I beg to move.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I will say a few words in support of the spirit, at any rate, of this amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. I declare an interest as chairman of the Windsor Energy Group, adviser to various energy companies, as in the register, and president of the Energy Industries Council. As the noble Baroness has rightly said, this is a sensible requirement for the future because, as she has also said, the North Sea is a mature province and the industry is clearly undergoing huge change—probably the biggest period of change since the 1970s and early 1980s. Most of the talk in the industry at the moment is about the impact of the halving of the oil price. Even in this morning’s papers, we see some pronouncements by experts on the possibility of whole areas of the North Sea shutting down unless completely new arrangements and management structures can be devised to cope with the new situation.
Obviously, behind this lies the question of whether the price will stay down. My own view is that, barring high-impact events like huge new political upheavals beyond the ones we already have in the Middle East, there will be no obvious bounceback in the price for a very long time. People talk as though the OPEC countries had some choice of policy—they could just cut production and the price would go up. Well of course that would not happen. They have lost control of the price. Russia has no intention of co-operating, and the shale industry in America, although there have been a few bankruptcies, will come back again and increase production as soon as the price rises. So the OPEC countries would gain nothing. Iran of course may be coming on stream as well. All this means that the industry in the North Sea is now facing a period when, on the supply side, there will be a lot more oil. On the demand side, there will probably be rather flat demand, whether from China, from Japan—which is going back to nuclear so will not need so much—or, indeed, from the United States or us, where the demand for oil is flat or even falling.
This is a completely new management challenge. We must have some reassurance, at least in a year’s time but preferably from the start, that the new regulatory authority—the OGA, with its expanded powers into a separate agency, as is now proposed—has the facilities, opportunities and abilities to manage completely new requirements. We have to see a province that is going to adapt to low prices, that develops completely new opportunities and new technologies, not unrelated to the points made by the noble Baroness about the possible disposal of carbon dioxide through CCS techniques, and that learns from other countries. Norway in particular may have a lesson or two for us on how to maintain a mature province and develop new opportunities at sea.
Lord Howell of Guildford
Can I press the Minister a shade more on something that we tend to forget when we debate these great issues of carbon capture and the future of the industry, and that is cost? It has been estimated that about £40 billion will be required to handle the decommissioning of outdated, redundant infrastructure in the North Sea. This whole process may be greatly accelerated if, as I earlier predicted, oil prices stay well down or go very much further down than they are already in the next four or five years. There is a huge cost there.
There is obviously vast cost involved in the piping of CO2 into the North Sea, if that is the technology used, although brilliant minds like those of my noble friend Lord Oxburgh have thought of new ways of handling carbon without having to pipe it away into the North Sea into reservoirs. In some cases, reservoirs have to be suitably designed both to enhance oil production and to store the CO2. All of these involve huge sums, which have not been mentioned. On top of that, the Government appear to be thinking in terms of further tax reliefs of all kinds in the North Sea, and I hope a great simplification of tax—it has been obvious that we have needed that for the past five or six years and I am glad that it is coming now, but again that is a lost revenue. Should we not give a little attention, as we push forward with this major reorganisation of the administration of North Sea and UK continental shelf affairs, to the enormous sums and where they will come from? I imagine that the answer is probably from the consumer and energy prices, but the Government have a duty to the public to explain some of the implications of what is now unfolding before us, including that colossal figure for decommissioning.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, my noble friend makes a valid point about the decommissioning costs and costs in general, which are very much at the forefront of the Government’s thinking. He will be aware that the Oil and Gas Authority is essentially being paid for by the industry. Other than initial seed- corn support of a small amount from the Government and the Government conceivably stepping in in an emergency situation, it is self-financing. But there are aspects that we will come to later in the legislation that talk about the public purse, this being one consideration that has to be borne in mind in relation to relevant activities. I need no persuading that costs are central to what we are looking at here.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, in case any eyebrows were raised over the apparent difference between the noble Baroness’s figure of £9 billion and my figure of £40 billion, which are slightly different, I should make clear that I think the noble Baroness was talking about the next five years whereas I was talking about the next 25 years, over which time it is estimated that £40 billion will have to be spent removing redundant platforms and pipelines as well as plugging spent oil wells.
My noble friend said that the companies would fund all this. I wonder whether that makes reassuring sense in the light of what the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, said about these companies being increasingly strapped for cash. If we are only half right about the evolution of world oil and gas prices—and it looks as though we are going into a period of prolonged glut in that field—the North Sea companies will have very tight budgets. This additional cost—whether it is £9 billion over five years or £40 billion over 25 years—will have to be found from somewhere. As we advance into this era and ask the OGA to take on these new responsibilities, and as we work out the practicalities of CCS, which have not yet all been solved, and the costs of it, we must be careful that we do not store up colossal financial problems for the future that will lead people in years to come to ask why we did not make clearer preparations. I wish to make clear the difference between the two figures of £9 billion and £40 billion and suggest yet again that we focus very carefully on where the money will come from.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her amendment and my noble friend Lord Howell for his comments. Without wishing to be too much of a doomsayer, I appreciate that there is always the chance of any business going into bankruptcy or company going into insolvency. The legal position is that decommissioning costs are picked up by industry under the Petroleum Act 1998—and industry does, of course, get tax relief.
I will address the noble Baroness’s points on Amendments 2 and 9. Minimising the costs of decommissioning in the North Sea to both industry and the taxpayer will be a central focus of the new legislative landscape. It is essential that we create an environment that encourages collaboration and co-operation in order to bring down overall costs. The reuse of viable North Sea infrastructure is a top priority for the Oil and Gas Authority. As I outlined earlier, the Wood review suggested that the Office of Carbon Capture and Storage would work closely with the Oil and Gas Authority in moving this forward. That, indeed, is what is happening in line with the recommendations made by Sir Ian Wood in his review.
That said, I understand the thrust of what is being said and can confirm that decommissioning is high on the Government’s agenda. Obviously there are costs associated with it and it is essential that we do it in the most cost-effective way, bringing in the possibility of reusing decommissioned sites in relation to CCS. I hope that noble Lords have had a letter indicating that the Government will bring forward amendments on decommissioning on Report. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to bring them forward earlier, but it is my intention that these amendments will address the issues of decommissioning costs and the viable reuse of infrastructure in the North Sea. On that basis, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw the amendment. I look forward to debating decommissioning in more detail on Report when government amendments on these issues will be brought forward.
Energy Bill [HL]
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as honorary president of the Energy Industries Council, chair of the Windsor Energy Group, adviser to Mitsubishi Electric Europe and, recently, president of the British Institute of Energy Economics. I have four points to put to your Lordships. First, I hope that this Bill, which the Minister has presented so ably, is the harbinger of more changes to come. Our energy policy is one of the less happy legacies of the previous coalition Government and major alterations are badly needed in the light of changed circumstances.
To this day, the trilemma facing our energy policymakers—to combine affordability, reliability and decarbonisation—remains totally unresolved. As we know, energy costs and bills are through the roof, causing much suffering. It is ridiculous in an advanced society that energy and fuel banks have to be opened to help vulnerable people to avoid freezing, or that Tata Steel has to lay off hundreds of workers because of “cripplingly high electricity costs”. This is self-harm on a grand scale.
Meanwhile, the electricity supply system has become precarious, with safety margins still much too narrow—although I believe that National Grid will manage to cope, just—and new gas turbine capacity is not being built nearly fast enough. This is despite heroic attempts, which we in this House are all familiar with, by the Government to induce more investors to come forward and put money into new gas generating plant: for example, by guaranteeing plant revenues and other devices that we have discussed at great length.
As for decarbonisation, emissions from our home production may be down but carbon leakage and imports mean that the actual emissions embedded in our consumption patterns are way up. Even if they were not, one has to ask what all this is doing for climate change, which is our main concern. I know the theory is that it will work by example and, like others, I hope that other countries around the globe will agree at the forthcoming Paris conference to new and binding CO2 limits, which the Minister mentioned. However, with over 2,000 new coal-burning generators being planned or built around the world, and when one hears the determination of Indian leaders, come what may, to go for massively increased coal to get cheap power for development, one has to wonder to what extent our efforts so far are making an impact on the real issue of combating climate change.
I hope that the Bill is the beginning of something better, with resources going less to endless subsidies to high-cost renewables and more to the research and technology that will get costs down and make green power cheaper and cleaner. I look forward to green power that can make do without subsidies at all. I can easily understand the dismay, which we have heard about, of those who have invested and planned on the assumption that subsidies and support would stay the same for ever and a day. However, once they get too high—too good to be true, as it were, and for some investors that has certainly been the case—common sense ought to warn that Ministers and officials can change, Governments come and go, the mood may change and public money may run out. The wisest guidance there is not “Invest more” but “Put not too much trust in princes”. If the true climate impact of our efforts globally is small, though important; if energy reliability has become less, not more; and if the environmental effect is negative, as it is for many people, the voter and the taxpayer are bound to ask what on earth they are paying the premium for and why. Subsidies and support prices are bound to be capped; the only surprise is why it was not done, and did not start, earlier.
Secondly, I come to the major part of the clauses in the Bill, concerned with the Oil and Gas Authority. I hope that it will be strong enough to cope with the long string of problems that the North Sea now faces. The chief of these will be the weak oil price for a long while to come. We are moving into an area of major oil and gas surplus, not only because of the vast American shale oil and gas expansion but because Iran will shortly be adding a few million barrels a day to the market and Saudi Arabia is pumping more than ever. On the demand side the outlook is flat, with even Chinese oil thirst slowing down. With strong supply and weak demand, it does not take a rocket scientist to see where that points. There may be spikes to come in the oil price from so-called high-impact events in the Middle East but the trend is down, down, down. That is going to place considerable strains on North Sea oil and gas producers and all the ancillary industries surrounding and supporting them. I hope very much that the new authority is going to be able, and will have the powers, to cope with the enormous challenges ahead.
My third point is that in everything to do with renewables, as in this Bill, we are of course governed by EU energy policy. This, as we know, vacillates but is currently dominated by the need to reduce dependence on Russian gas. Like our own policy, EU energy policy has been badly wrong-footed by events and needs constant overhauling. Stupendous errors have been made, and I hope and trust that one of the key points in the negotiations on EU reform being held by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister will be the need for radical changes in the way that energy policy is handled between the EU Commission and member states.
Fourthly, in closing off in Clause 60 the renewables obligation for future new onshore wind—that is, the obligation on energy companies to buy highly expensive wind power electricity—one is bound to ask: who next? How and where will the levy control framework next be applied? The Minister gave some strong hints on that but we read in the papers today that maybe small solar farms will be the next in line.
By far the biggest obligation, or future burden, on consumers and households is the Hinkley Point C nuclear project. I am very pro nuclear and pro its low-carbon contribution but this must be one of the worst deals ever for British households and British industry. Furthermore, the component suppliers to EDF are in trouble, costs keep rising, no reactor of this kind has ever been completed successfully, those that are being built are years behind and workers at the site have been laid off, so personally I would shed no tears at all if the elephantine Hinkley Point C project were abandoned in favour of smaller and possibly cheaper nuclear plants a bit later on. A far better hope lies with the Japanese nuclear plants at Wylfa and Moorside. The Japanese can build quicker with more tested and reliable reactor designs, and, because of cheap gas for years to come, we will not need them so soon anyway. I would very much like to hear the Minister’s assessment of what is happening on this front.
When it comes to decarbonising world energy, what happens in India and China is far more important than anything we do on renewables here. I hope that in all our energy priorities and in our handling of relations with the great Indian nation we will keep this in perspective. It is in the technology and innovation to reduce renewable costs, to make storage commercial and to push up energy efficiency at all stages of the power supply chain, and in the cleaner burning of coal across Asia, in particular, that our salvation lies, not in offering soaring and uncapped subsidies. We need to decarbonise but at an affordable and manageable pace, and that is where our resource priorities should now be directed. I hope that this Bill is a modest start in that direction.