Great British Energy Bill

Viscount Trenchard Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd January 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 113. I have previously tabled amendments to the Bill on land, and now I return to the sea, which well fits someone whose territorial designation is Gorleston-on-Sea in the county of Norfolk.

These amendments require the Secretary of State to assess the impact on the environment and animal welfare standards of the installation and generation of tidal energy technologies and their associated cabling. When we consider tidal energy, I am not thinking just about the fish, important though they are—in the tidal races, the machines can mash their flesh—but about sea-birds and the rest of the marine flora and fauna. I am thinking about not just living creatures but the wider environmental effects that may happen slightly away from the installations of the machines themselves, in the associated cabling that links those machines to land—a topic I will return to.

I am not against harnessing this almost inexhaustible supply of energy. The energy is there; it is year-round, predictable and reliable. It deserves to be won and it should be won. But I am not starry-eyed about the practicality of building machines that can survive in the most hostile environment, pounded by the seas and eaten away by salt-water corrosion. I am involved in the liquid fertiliser business, so I know more than most how hard it is to reliably engineer things in these tough, salt-aggressive environments. It is hard to engineer reliability in these unforgiving places, but that does not mean we should not try.

We know that tidal generation is best located where the water flows fastest—where it is choked through the channels, so that the speed naturally increases—so the machines can operate most effectively. Last November, I visited Saint-Malo and saw for myself the world’s first tidal barrage power station, opened in 1966; it is nearly 60 years old. It was a really impressive spectacle. It is cheap energy, but it has not come without cost. Thomas Adcock, an associate professor in the department of engineering science at the University of Oxford, says that there has been a “major environmental impact” on the Rance estuary as a result of the tidal station. He said that

“this would make it very difficult to get permission to do such a barrage again”.

Researchers point to the adverse impacts on marine life of altering sedimentation patterns, as well as the impact on oxygen and nutrient levels in the water. I saw for myself that the fast-flowing water passing through the 24 turbines left nowhere for the fish to go. Sand-eels and plaice have disappeared, and the silting has reduced the number and variation of other fauna. Sand-eels are the subject of the very first post-Brexit EU fishing trade spat, and of course they are the preferred diet of British sea sea-birds, so this is an important matter. It is in the public interest that this all be taken into account, so that mitigations can be put in place.

My amendment would require GB Energy to take into account a number of factors and to continuously monitor them when assessing energy proposals. Examples include the cumulative impacts of the installations when considered alongside the predicted impacts of other projects in the area; transboundary impacts, whereby activities in other countries, such as commercial fishing, may be affected, as we have seen; and interrelationships whereby impacts on one receptor, such as noise, can have a knock-on effect on another and disturb species. Examples include sub-sea noise, which my noble friend mentioned, physical processes such sedimentation flow —we saw this in France—and the updated navigational risk assessment possibly deflecting vessels into the path of other sensitive zones.

For offshore tidal proposals, perhaps with tethered devices, we must have regard to the cables that will transfer the energy to the coast. Coming from Norfolk, I take particular interest in the Cromer shoal chalk beds marine conservation zone. It is one of 91 such protection zones established by the last Government, by an organisation lately chaired by my noble friend Lord Banner. The MCZ is a protected inshore site 200 metres off the north Norfolk coast, extending about 10 kilometres out to sea and covering 321 square kilometres. It protects our diverse species. It is predominantly sandy, but the chalk beds provide a stable surface for seaweeds and static animals to settle and grow, and they are home to the Cromer crab, one of the important exports of our county; it is an important source of economic activity too. So, even though marine energy machines may be some miles offshore, we need to consider the whole cable system as well, particularly if it passes through places like the Cromer MCZ on its way to the grid.

None of this is mentioned in the Bill, which is a slim Bill with fat consequences. The Secretary of State is not required to give directions to GBE to take these important environmental safeguards into account. My previous amendments observed that GB Energy is a company: there is to be a fiduciary board, and it is established under the Companies Act 2006 to promote its private self-interest. So, unless it is constrained, we should not be surprised if GB Energy acts in its private interests, not the country’s interests. If it follows purely commercial principles, why should it need to take the marine environment into account unless it is directed to? This amendment would require the Secretary of State to provide such directions.

I expect the Minister to say, “This is all very well but it is not really necessary”. However, we must learn lessons from the water Bill, which flowed through this House as an example of what to do when you have a private company that is established for public purposes yet strays from the path. I do not want a repeat of that. Success does not look like having successive legislation later to cure the unintended consequences of GB Energy getting carried away because it acts in the private interest, not the public one.

Let us put protections in the Bill now. This amendment would provide a simple safeguard, along with those proposed by my noble friend Lord Offord of Garvel, so that the Secretary of State is directed to ensure that sensible precautions are taken to protect our fisheries, sea-birds and other flora and fauna in the whole end-to-end tidal generation system, from the coast all the way to the grid. I am not trying to block tidal power and I am certainly not seeking to add cost or complexity—still less a set of directions or to provide excessive control. My concern is to make sure that this private body, established for public purpose, acts in the wider public interest—not just its self-interest—as to its environmental responsibility and sets an example to others.

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend Lord Offord’s Amendments 111 and 112, to which I have added my name. It has become increasingly apparent, from many points of view, that impact assessments are necessary. In particular, in exercising its functions, GBE should be required to consider the environmental impact and the effect on sea-birds and marine life of its installation of offshore wind facilities, as well as of its decommissioning of oil and gas structures.

I also support my noble friend Lord Fuller’s Amendment 113, which seeks to place the same obligation on GBE with reference to tidal energy projects. I have looked for information on both the Sound of Islay project and the Bristol Channel project, both of which I was reasonably familiar with some years ago but about which I have heard nothing in recent years. I am heartened by my noble friend’s enthusiasm for the sector and look forward to hearing whether the Minister expects that GBE will be encouraged to make investments in it. As my noble friend Lord Fuller said, this is a slim Bill with fat consequences. We have to make sure that GBE will act in the public interest.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friends Lord Offord and Lord Fuller for tabling the three amendments in this group, all of which I support. I want to address a few remarks to Amendment 111.

I had not realised that we are the second-largest renewable energy market in the world. Most of the equipment is made outside the UK; I hope this is something we will do better on in future. I do not think my noble friend referred to the position of porpoises and dolphins, which have been causing me great concern over the past few years for the same reasons that my noble friend Lord Offord gave. We took evidence on this from the RSPB and from the department of ocean systems—I think it was called that—at the University of Plymouth in 2020-21.

Two issues arose from that which I would like to put to the Minister. The first, from the RSPB, said that “substantial sums” are being made, which really should be

“reinvested back into the natural environment from which”

these sums are derived. Is that something the Government are keen to do? The reason I ask is simple: I asked for a moratorium at that time, when we were under a Conservative Administration, until we had established what the impact was on birds and other marine life, such as whales, porpoises and dolphins. Over the last five years, we have had a number of inexplicable bankings of whales in particular but also of dolphins and porpoises. It is up to the industry to fund this work, so that we better understand why this is happening. If, as my noble friend Lord Offord argued, there is interference with the sonar of marine life, that should be established before we build the next stage of these massive developments at sea.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, it is disappointing that no financial framework details were included in the Bill, as they should have been. Amendment 125, which will be spoken to by my noble friend Lord Offord, would ensure that the Bill cannot come into force until the Secretary of State has laid before Parliament, together with a Motion for resolution in each House, a revised financial framework document. This would improve transparency and accountability, which are in short supply in this Bill, as has been noted by many noble Lords.

I have also added my name to Amendments 126 and 127 in this group, which would essentially require the Government to explain the impact of their proposals on the number of jobs in Aberdeen and would require a report on the cost and viability of their net-zero targets. I fear that the negative approach to the oil and gas industry based in Aberdeen will lead to more job losses than will be created by the location of GBE in that city. I am also not at all sure that the type of people being made redundant by oil and gas enterprises being forced to destroy economically beneficial businesses are the same type of people GBE will wish to recruit. It is clear that the Government’s decision to locate in Aberdeen was intended to mitigate the damage to that city’s economy, but I am not at all sure that that will be the case. I support my noble friend Lord Hamilton in calling the Government to account on these matters through tabling these two amendments.

As I said at Second Reading, we cannot rely on renewables to continue to decarbonise the grid, or even begin to replace our much larger industrial energy consumption, which is still dependent largely on oil and gas. My noble friend Lord Frost explained on 14 November, and again today, how serious a problem the intermittency of renewables is. It is essential that the Government think again before confirming the premature ending of oil and gas, at least until more serious attention has been paid to the possibilities that nuclear may offer. In this regard, we should be a little bit more like France.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I speak to the two amendments in my name. The first, Amendment 126, is about the jobs in Aberdeen. Unfortunately, this amendment gets involved only in the number of jobs that are created by Great British Energy in Aberdeen. As my noble friend Lord Trenchard has already referred to, it does not make any reference to the number of jobs that have already been destroyed by the Secretary of State for Energy in not granting any more licences in the North Sea, which will have—