Long-duration Energy Storage (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, both for the report and for the clarity with which she has introduced this debate. I also thank the committee and its staff. Every time the last Government introduced an energy Bill or an energy Statement, I asked what they were doing about storage. I did not get any clearer reply than the committee evidently got from Ministers then. I do not think things have improved subsequently, but I welcome the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Gustafsson, and I hope that in her reply she will indicate which departments are responsible for which in this area—I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, here. I mention this partly because I listened to the introduction from the noble Lord, Lord Borwick. I worked for the father of the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, as a Minister even earlier, when we had separate ministries of technology and of fuel and power, and they failed to get on. Subsequent Prime Ministers have altered the demarcation several times since, and I would like to know what the new Government’s structure is, not only between those two departments but right across Whitehall.

It is important that we focus on storage. I have asked the previous Government and I ask this Government whether they agree that we will not approach the recommended path to net zero unless we have a very significant storage contribution reasonably quickly and, hopefully, as cost effectively as we can manage. I hope that this Government will rapidly move to a clear strategy for storage—of all technologies.

In the meantime, I want to concentrate on one dimension of this, which is the availability of hydrogen for both production purposes and storage, and the way in which we produce hydrogen at scale which does not itself create carbon emissions and slow down the approach to net zero. The last Government issued a number of White Papers on hydrogen; this Government have issued one, but it does not answer that question. At present, nowhere in the world to my knowledge is very substantial, at-scale production of green hydrogen being made available to industry. We have grey and blue hydrogen and we have moves to make hydrogen production somewhat cleaner and more cost efficient, but we do not have green hydrogen at scale. Yet most of the sectors which we are intending to transform by 2030, or, in some cases, by 2035, require some input of hydrogen.

The last Government and this Government have implied, but never stated definitively, that they have abandoned any idea that hydrogen will be the main replacement for natural gas in our home and office heating systems, except in very exceptional circumstances, but there are still places where the assumption is that hydrogen will be used: in heavy industry, possibly in heavy transport and possibly even in marine and aviation. There will be lots of demand for hydrogen. Hydrogen for storage will be but one of them. Yet we are not clear how we produce that hydrogen in a way which is not itself a contributing factor to emissions of carbon if we use methane and other means.

I hope that this Government will commit themselves to making clear within the next 12 months or so where the hydrogen is going to come from, how rapidly we are able to deploy it and what technologies will be used in addition to hydrogen to provide the necessary electricity storage, which the committee has drawn attention to. Unless we answer that question, we will fail not only on long-duration electricity storage but on providing decarbonisation of some of our most significant industrial and service sectors. I hope therefore that, in whatever government department it is, attention is drawn over the next few months to hydrogen production, because even with major policies as advocated by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on demand reduction and energy efficiency, we will not meet that transition pathway without it.

Autumn Budget 2024

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, because he reminds us that solving the economic and fiscal problems of the country requires solving the economic and fiscal problems of local government and its services, of which social care is one of the biggest. That needs to be part of the Government’s economic strategy.

I congratulate the Minister on giving us such a coherent introduction; I add my congratulations to his boss, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who gave a bravura speech, which I listened to in full the other day. She has given the country at least a sense of direction and hope, even though there are some details that the House has demanded.

I warn the Minister that I was going to focus entirely on the areas I disagree with or feel need revisiting. But I was so provoked by the lead spokesperson for the Opposition being so blind and in a sense of denial and misrepresentation about the inheritance we have received. There was the whole period of austerity, followed by ludicrous claims about Brexit and then serious increases in taxation for businesses and individuals. The legacy we have had is a very difficult one for Treasury Ministers and the Cabinet to deal with, and this Budget makes only a start on that. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, emphasised, it has to be paralleled with other key strategies, two of which I have a particular interest in. One of them is environmental and the other is on equality.

My noble friend Lady Lister talked about the equality impact of this Budget, particularly in the social security system. I agree with her about some of the measures that are implied in this Budget in relation to the winter fuel arrangements and the two-child limit. I feel those both need to be revisited by the Government at some time during the next few years, if not immediately in this Budget or the next.

On the environmental side, I welcome the allocations to what are basically green projects and support for green energy but, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, who is no longer in his place, and others have said, the interventions on transport seem completely wrong. The previous Government were completely wrong in freezing fuel duty when we have a problem. I was on the committee that recently reported to your Lordships on the difficulty of changing to electric vehicles; that is not helped by the freezing of fuel duty on fossil fuels. We need to do the opposite and raise fossil fuel duty while encouraging the uptake of electric cars to reduce congestion and the air quality effects of fossil fuel emissions.

If we are moving in the wrong direction on the environment in certain key aspects, we need to review the basis of taxation policy in transport as a whole, as others have referred to. That needs to be part of the project for the next five years.

We also need to look at the basis of local authority finance. There are local authorities up and down the land, of all political persuasions and sizes—from regional mayors down to local town councils and so forth—who get nothing from this Budget. We need a new, solid and growing basis for financing the services that are delivered through local authorities. Unless the Treasury is prepared to look at that in real detail over the next few years—starting with a spending review this year and hopefully subsequent Budgets—we will not be able to deliver not only social care but most of the services to which people have referred, including education, that are so vital to sustaining the growth strategy.

So, this is a good start on a growth strategy, but it needs a lot more solid allocations to other strategies. In particular, it requires us to address the growing inequality that has persisted in our land over the last few years, and at the same time to address the problems of the environment which are threatening our whole world.