Electricity Market Reform

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Lord Marland

Thursday 16th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marland]

There is no greater expert than the noble Lord on these matters. I can assure him that this electricity market reform is to establish a level playing field for renewables and to get a clearer line of benefits and support for it. As to his point about nuclear power, we have cleared the decks for the start of new nuclear. His experience would concur that, unfortunately, the period for establishing a new nuclear power station is a minimum of eight years. Then there are all the other regulatory issues that we must go through in getting to there alone. My noble friend will know—because he is so knowledgeable on all these matters—that the 2050 pathway, which will incur a doubling of electricity demand, means that we will have to obtain electricity from virtually every source we can get our hands on.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, it looks as though we are in for another cold weekend. As the weather gets colder, the confidence of consumers in being able to turn on the heating without worrying too much about price needs to be reinforced. To do that, we need to have confidence in our supply. Building on the last question, can the Minister give some assurance about developing nuclear to help fill the energy gap, and developing it on time, particularly given the Health and Safety Executive’s decision not to issue final certificates to new forms of nuclear technology? Similarly, can he give some assurance that the Government will invest in skills so that we can grow such skills in the eight-to-10-year window? Will we develop those skills domestically in areas such as Somerset, down the road from where I live, where we want to see the nuclear skills academy going ahead with confidence?

[Lord Marland]

The noble Lord makes an extremely good point on skills. There has been inertia in nuclear. I pay credit to the previous Government for reversing public opinion on nuclear, but not for the fact that there has been no activity. We have created much activity. Nine months ago, or when we got into power, people would have asked what was going to happen on nuclear. SIs have now created the opportunity for new nuclear. It has become a fundamental part of our programme. There is a serious task in obtaining the skills to satisfy that programme. I welcome the noble Lord’s support for that. It is fundamental because we have lost those skills in the past 20 years and it will be no small task to regain them. Therefore, we must have a programme that runs concurrently with the development to make sure that they both happen, and that we can cope with the eight or nine power stations that will, we hope, be built in the next few years.