Draft Electricity Supplier Obligations (Green Excluded Electricity) (Amendment) Regulations 2023

Alan Brown Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2023 General Committees

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. The regulations are straightforward, and I will try to keep my remarks to around 15 minutes, so that we can get to the Chamber for the statement. The Minister said that the regulations would help counteract the disincentive, or would incentivise some suppliers to import renewable energy from the continent, instead of generating it in Great Britain. I wonder how much work has been done to assess that, because I note that no impact assessment has been undertaken for the effects of this statutory instrument. I would like to know how the Government think that it will disincentivise that operation.

If we are looking at disincentivising the importing of electricity, we really need to look at the grid charging regime and not have the north of Scotland having the highest grid charges in Europe, because imports of electricity do not pay any grid charges. That is a glaring error that needs to be tackled.

I agree with the Minister that CfD has been a success story; I am quite happy to put that on the record, and to commend it, but as we move to allocation round 5, he is, I hope, aware that there are real costs and inflationary pressures, and there will be real issues with the strike rates that have been talked about for AR5. That needs to be reviewed. I will just make a plug for tidal stream energy: it should have a much bigger ringfenced pot.