Methane (Environment and Climate Change Committee Report)

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Grand Committee

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity to say a few words in the gap. I congratulate the committee on its report and the chair on her opening speech and on securing the debate.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Jay, I am a methane learner. I remember first discovering its importance in the late 1980s, when I talked to Sir Jack Lewis, who had been appointed by Mrs Thatcher as chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and who later became a Member of this House. It struck me at the time that this concentration—80 times, as has been mentioned several times—was very powerful stuff. I think it is a 45% reduction that would help meet our Paris climate change target of 2030.

On the other hand, I am encouraged by some recent research. Last year, I came across something by Professor Vincent Gauci of the University of Birmingham. Apparently, microbes in tree bark in the world’s forests absorb much more methane than previously thought. Tree bark has previously been overlooked for its climate contribution. Apparently, if all the tree bark in the world was laid flat, it would cover the surface of the earth, so it represents a vast area for gas exchange between bark and atmosphere.

Scientific research these days is often about vast quantities of data generated in a wide variety of areas, of which climate change is one. Last Friday, I happened to visit the Harwell Space Cluster. Believe me, the sheer amount of data it deals with from earth observation satellites is phenomenal, as I am sure the Committee will appreciate. I make the point to my noble friend the Minister and others that it is vital to continue to collect this data. I will direct my remarks towards chapter 3 of the committee’s report, recommendation 7 and the Government’s response to it.

Ordinarily, to say something like “collect the data” would be neither unusual nor particularly interesting. However, we live in a time when things are changing. On 16 April, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a whole list of datasets regarding ocean monitoring that will be removed by the middle of this month. On 23 April, the BBC reported:

“Swathes of scientific data deletions are sweeping across US government websites—with decades of health, climate change and extreme weather research at risk. Now, scientists are racing to save their work before it’s lost”.


This is a tremendously important point. I can give the Committee further examples. Apparently, somebody researching the history of the Greenland ice sheet is afraid that all the data related to it will be deleted by the American authorities one way or another. It may be that the data shows a different pattern of Greenland’s ice sheets in the past that would affect our calculation of the future.

My time is almost up, so my plea to my noble friend the Minister is that, when he takes part in discussions with other countries on behalf of the British Government—I believe there is a UNFCCC conference in June 2027 on the horizon—he will do everything he can to ensure that we continue to collect the data without which debates like this are not possible and without which we cannot measure and make the progress we need to make on climate change.

Energy Grid Resilience

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, as I think I have already said, the security of our energy system is clearly critical. I take the point the noble and right reverend Lord raised about cybersecurity. Noble Lords will have seen the devastating impact that this has had on retailers in the last few weeks. We work with the National Cyber Security Centre. We are very exercised about this. I can assure the noble and right reverend Lord that we are not at all complacent.

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My noble friend the Minister has already referred to the fact that the system operator is introducing innovative new approaches. Might that involve the application of AI to managing the grid? Looking further ahead, and in the light of the report from your Lordships’ Science and Technology Committee on long-duration energy storage, could the Minister indicate whether or when the Government might take the type of strategic interest in long-duration energy storage that we will need?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My noble friend is right about AI; that was one of the main points raised in the Tony Blair Institute report, which was raised earlier. We are giving long-duration energy storage a great deal of attention.

Transport Decarbonisation Plan

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Thursday 24th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords—

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords—

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

We will hear from the Cross Benches.

Internet Activity: Energy Use

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Viscount Stansgate]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the amount of energy used in internet activity, and in particular in mining cryptocurrencies.

[The Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Lord Hunt of Kings Heath) (Lab)]

My Lords, the National Energy System Operator has estimated that data centres consume around 2.5% of the UK’s electricity. The UK is not a major centre for cryptocurrency mining. We estimate the share of power consumed in the UK for this purpose to be negligible.

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that Answer. I do not know whether the House quite realises the staggering quantities of energy involved in normal internet activity and, in particular, in crypto mining. It has been estimated that the usage is approximately the same as that of a mid-sized European country, such as the Netherlands or Denmark. How much of this activity is based in the UK? Who is doing it and where? Does my noble friend agree that it has an adverse impact on carbon emissions and brings with it electronic waste? Will he agree to undertake an assessment of the potential adverse effects on carbon emissions of internet activity and, in particular, of crypto mining, so that we can have an honest discussion about the future and the effect of this on our climate change objectives?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My noble friend is right to raise this important question. I should say that the Government keep this under review. In fact, we reckon that only 0.2% of global crypto mining takes place in the UK. The International Energy Agency has estimated that, in 2022, 2% of total global energy demand came from data centres, cryptocurrencies and AI. It expects that to double by 2026. However, it makes the point that it expects that doubling to be met by an increase in clean energy sources. The lesson here for us is that we need to power on with our aim to get to clean power by 2030.

Great British Energy Bill

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I am not entirely sure that it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, for reasons that will become clear in a moment. I think it would have been better in my case if I had preceded the noble Lord; nevertheless, it is obviously a pleasure to follow him, not least because he is a fellow Deputy Speaker of the House.

I rise in support of the Bill and its objectives. I begin by congratulating my noble friend Lady Beckett on her maiden speech and the noble Lord, Lord Mackinlay of Richborough, on his. The House is very fortunate to have heard two such remarkable maiden speeches in the same debate.

My noble friend Lady Beckett is someone with enormous parliamentary experience. She was first elected to another place over 50 years ago; I well remember her as the candidate for Lincoln in 1974. She was later the able—if only temporary—leader of my own party. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, has said everything that one might wish to be said about her remarkable career. She is very welcome to this House. She mentioned that she knows something of it in advance through chairing the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. As a member of that committee, I know what she means.

I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Mackinlay of Richborough. What a remarkable personal story. He has attracted the most universal admiration for what he has been through. I do not know about other noble Lords, but I, for one, will never forget the reception he got when he returned to another place just before the end of the last Parliament—which was itself remarkable.

The Bill is the centrepiece of the Government’s strategy to achieve net zero and, as such, will pave the way for a wide range of measures in the years ahead. Noble Lords have spoken about a wide variety of different aspects of energy policy. If I may say so, I thought the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, gave a pretty comprehensive description of the range of current relevant factors in the energy debate. Other noble Lords have used their speeches to focus on other areas.

In directing my remarks to Clause 5(1), I will make one point that I wanted to bring to the House’s attention. It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Duncan, has temporarily left his place, because I wanted to raise the issue of long-duration energy storage. LDES is not exactly an acronym that trips off the tongue, but it is vital to the transformation to net zero which the Bill hopes to promote.

Your Lordships’ Committee on Science and Technology—of which I am a member—looked at this issue earlier this year, and today is a relevant moment to bring our main conclusions to the attention of the House. Your Lordships may want to know what long-duration energy storage is. Medium-duration energy storage refers to technologies best suited to storing energy for between four and 24 hours—batteries, for example—or up to a few days at most. Long-duration energy storage applies to technologies that store energy across multiple days, weeks, months or even years.

In this country we are going to need both medium- and long-duration storage, but in my remarks today I want to refer only to long-duration energy storage and the technologies that could provide it. We are going to need government policies in support of long-duration energy storage in the UK and wider changes in the energy system required to facilitate its deployment.

To reach the UK’s net-zero targets, our energy system, as other noble Lords have mentioned, must be transformed. This is going to involve its substantial electrification, where fossil-fuel use in transportation, heating and industry will need to be replaced by electricity, in parallel with the expansion and decarbonisation of the electricity supply. This will replace fossil-fuelled electricity generation with low-carbon alternatives. Renewable energy, predominantly from wind and solar, is expected to play a major role in the UK. The Climate Change Committee forecast in its balanced pathway scenario that electricity demand is likely to double by 2050.

However, renewable energy from wind and solar will deliver a variable supply of electricity due to changes in the weather. If noble Lords want an example, they need look no further than what life was like in the UK two weeks ago. At the beginning of November, the UK experienced a period of anticyclonic gloom, which occurs when an anticyclone of high pressure traps pockets of wet weather close to the ground. In turn, this creates a period of dull, grey and cloudy weather, with a high chance of mist and fog. If noble Lords look back just two weeks, the weather was dull, grim and grey—not remotely windy or sunny. In fact, a place called Odiham in Hampshire received zero minutes of sunshine for the first week of November.

By contrast, about a month earlier, just over half of UK electricity came from zero-carbon sources—including solar, which briefly at that point during the day peaked at providing 83% of all the electricity being used that day. The noble Lord, Lord Duncan of Springbank, is not the only person who looks up the amount of energy being used at any given moment.

The balance between renewable sources and baseload provided by nuclear and gas can and does change. That is just a fact of energy life. The electrification of heating and transport means that demand for electricity will be larger and more variable over time. Climate change and its effects on weather will also impact renewable energy demand. The electricity system will need to be substantially expanded and made more resilient—another word I emphasise to your Lordships tonight—to ensure that it can deliver a secure power supply whatever the load demands or weather systems that we experience. This question of resilience is a key factor behind what makes long-duration energy storage so important. Energy storage technologies that allow energy generated by renewables to be stored over time and used when required will be increasingly essential in achieving net zero.

The one sentence that I would like your Lordships to remember tonight is this: I believe that a strategic reserve of stored energy will be an indispensable part of our future energy policy, and that it will be for the body set up by this Bill to deliver it. I would be interested to hear what the Minister says on this point. The Royal Society estimates that a substantial volume of long-duration storage, enough to supply approximately one-third of current annual UK electricity generation, could ultimately be needed. This could fulfil different roles on the grid and there are facilities for the storage of it. Hydrogen is probably the leading candidate for long-duration energy storage over weeks and months. Low-carbon hydrogen can be produced—for example, from electrolysis, where electricity is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be stored under moderate pressure in, for example, underground salt caverns, as has already been mentioned, or converted in depleted gas fields and later burned to produce electricity or converted into gases that are easier to transport, such as ammonia. Perhaps my noble friend the Minister can give an updated response in the light of the new Government’s deadlines and targets and some of the key institutions responsible for planning, operating and regulating the energy system.

The national grid used to be considered so boring that people went to sleep if you talked about it. Now, on the contrary, how we use our national grid and how, for example, we enable the vast new wind power resources to connect to it from the North Sea is anything but boring. In fact, it will be pretty controversial, not least because of the need for more high-tension pylons to carry the electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed onshore.

The scale of long-duration energy storage needed and the benefits to the grid are vital. The Select Committee report said:

“Domestic energy storage is not just about a resilient decarbonised grid—it is about the security and stability of the whole economy. The global energy crisis that began in 2021 has been an object lesson in the UK’s vulnerability to global wholesale energy price fluctuations, and the consequent effects on inflation. The UK had less storage capacity than comparator nations”.


In his reply, perhaps my noble friend the Minister can give some indication of what role he sees for long-duration energy storage in the future. I gently remind him that the subtitle of the Select Committee’s report published earlier this year was “Get on with it”. The Minister’s response will be an important clue as to the scale of the task ahead and our chances of success.