Offshore Wind

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I know that the noble Baroness is passionate about onshore wind. I hope the changes that we announced will produce more capacity. As I said, we have just let 24 projects under the latest CfD round. She is right that the industry said in advance of this round that it wanted to be paid more. Across all the different areas of government for which I have been responsible, I have never met a private developer who want to be paid less for what they do. Let us be realistic: this is a negotiation process. Of course, industry will say, “We need to be paid more; we need to be given larger contracts”. That is entirely understandable. We have to bear in mind our responsibility to the bill payer who ends up paying these costs. We of course want to see more renewable capacity laid out—it is intermittent but it is cheap. We need to produce a strike price that is fair to the developers, so that they get a return, but also to the bill payers.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister is right that we should praise ourselves for the offshore wind farms, which I must say are most impressive. However, the interconnectors and so on lie along the seabed. Like so many other aspects of our energy supply and other things, the seabed has certain vulnerabilities. We have seen Russian ships from the main directorate of undersea research regularly in the North Sea, going along areas where these lie. Is the Minister happy that we have put enough effort into monitoring and tracking where they are all the time and then using ships, aircraft and whatever else to go and make sure that those lines are still safe?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a good point. There are a number of such areas of critical national infrastructure, including gas-interlinking pipelines and electricity interconnector cables with other countries, as well as our interconnector cables with the offshore wind farms. These are all critical vulnerabilities and the noble Lord can be assured that we monitor these things closely. We are well aware of the possible threat presented to them.

Oil and Gas Windfall Tax

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Wednesday 19th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My noble friend makes an important point. Taxation levels are obviously a matter for the Chancellor and the Treasury. However, there are a number of concerning stories from investors that they have pulled out of investments in the North Sea; in fact, one remarked that parts of Africa were a more stable tax environment.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on the £20 billion they put into the small modular reactor enterprise, and the work they have done for the STEP fission reactor. Does the Minister agree that the best net-zero way of ensuring that we have energy to provide the electrical baseload is to press ahead rapidly with Hinkley C and Sizewell because, if we do not get this nuclear power online, we are not going to make it?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I do agree with the noble Lord. Nuclear reactors, whether it be Sizewell or Hinkley, and small modular reactors will play an important part in the net-zero transition. Of course, we want a diverse supply mix; we want as much renewable energy as possible, but nuclear will play an important role.

Green Investment

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I do not agree with the noble Lord. There are reasons why the US adopted its policy —investment, which we welcome, into green renewable energy, et cetera. Of course, the US is starting from an awfully long way behind the UK. One of the reasons it has to put in such large subsidies is that it has not provided the long-term legislative certainty that we have.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, mention of rocks dropping into harbours by the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, brings to mind ships. On protectionism, what is our view of the latest legislation being passed by the EU, which seems to indicate that defence procurement will be from countries remaining in the EU and not go more widely?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord is always ingenious at getting defence and ships into every Question. I would need to speak to my Ministry of Defence colleagues for their response to that.