Energy Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, rising to speak at this point, I feel I need to respond directly to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, who asked about what zero or a miniscule amount of fossil fuel in the global energy system or Britain’s energy system by 2050 would look like. I am not going to address this in great detail, but I will point the noble Lord to a study published in 2019 by LUT University in Finland and the Energy Watch Group in Germany.

It mapped out in great detail what a 100% global renewable—no fossil fuels and no nuclear—energy system would look like. It would be economically competitive with the current fossil fuel and nuclear system. Before the noble Lord leaps up, he made much of the issue of intermittency of renewable sources. I point out that in this study 23% of electricity demand and 26% of heat demand is provided from stored sources to meet the need when necessary.

I will also address the suggestion made by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that net zero was a constraint on energy policy. The practical reality is—we are reminded of this fact today, as many noble Lords have noted—that we are now globally at 1.1 or 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels of warming. This is what 1.1 or 1.2 degrees looks like; 1.5 degrees would be much worse and beyond 1.5 degrees, as the world collectively agreed in Paris at the climate talks, is unthinkable. To sum it up, this is not politics; it is physics. It is the limit we have to meet, and that means not burning fossil fuels.

Coming to my main remarks, I declare my position on the advisory panel of Peers for the Planet and my positions as vice-president of the Local Government Association and the National Association of Local Councils.

I am delighted to see that my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb is foreshadowing the future: by occupying what might be a Front Bench wrap-up position on this debate, she will provide an overview of this Bill. A Green in that position is something that your Lordships’ House is clearly going to need more and more as the issues of the climate emergency and social justice, which are so central to Green political philosophy, become more and more pressing. She will be covering the utterly “inadequate and unlawful” state of government policies—these are not my words or those of my noble friend but the words of yesterday’s High Court judgment—and the solutions already on tap, including the Climate and Ecology Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, that had its Second Reading on Friday.

I will focus on some very specific elements of the Bill, and the ways in which we, as Greens, will be working with others to improve it. On improvements, I will begin by identifying some of the missing elements, which I am delighted to say have all been highlighted to varying degrees by other noble Lords.

First, we need enabling legislation to establish local energy supplies, aimed at reigniting the growth of community-run renewable energy schemes that were just taking off when the rug was pulled out from underneath them. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle, among others, has highlighted the importance of this. In the last Session of Parliament, we saw 308 MPs, including 120 Conservatives and 119 Labour MPs, supporting a local electricity Bill that would have created a local energy supply mechanism, enabling smaller-scale renewable generation schemes to sell their power directly to local people. This would have made many of these schemes more viable than they are now. I spoke about the rug being pulled out: we have seen hardly any growth in community energy schemes in the last six years. Those are not just six lost years in terms of cutting emissions but six lost years of local prosperity that could have been generated, particularly in those communities which are the subject of the Government’s levelling-up agenda. Money is being taken from the pockets of people who can ill afford it.

We have also seen the impact on so many small independent businesses and co-operatives; solar installers and small hydro scheme designers will certainly not accept that the Conservative Party is any sort of supporter of their sort of business. My understanding is that the Government have said that they will accept the aims of the Bill and that there have been preliminary meetings with the Energy Minister and BEIS officials. So I have direct question for the Minister: why is this not already in the Bill? This is something that is oven-ready, to use a popular phrase.

Secondly, another point that noble Lords have picked up, including the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, is the crucial role of local authorities and local communities in delivering net zero. The Climate Emergency UK website—which I checked this morning—shows that 409 councils have declared a climate emergency. Action is being taken locally, where it is acknowledged that this is of great importance, and there is huge potential for municipal energy and, crucially, for energy saving schemes. It is crucial for policy in the energy area, as in so many other areas, to get away from the deadening centralism of Westminster and to unleash the energy, enthusiasm and knowledge of democracy in local communities. As the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, set out, the money that has gone out to local communities is still being doled out on the decisions of central government, which is hanging on to the purse strings and handing over money only to those who will jump through the hoops that Westminster wants them to jump through.

This is something that is recognised on the global scale: I watched over several COPs as the Green councillor Andrew Cooper drove an acknowledgment of locally determined contributions into the international COP agreement. I am sure that all noble Lords in this debate have heard of nationally determined contributions as a part of COP, but locally determined contributions are also recognised, and we as a nation should be making much more of them.

Thirdly, in terms of missing areas, as several other noble Lords have already pointed to, we must end the barriers to new onshore wind. According to the Government’s own research, 80% of people in the UK now support onshore wind and only 4% oppose it. There is no relaxing of the planning rules around onshore wind in the recently published energy security strategy; the document says that the Government

“will consult this year on developing local partnerships”.

In his response, can the Minister tell me how that is going, and why there is nothing in the Bill for onshore wind?

It is clear that those three elements that I have identified as missing are all interrelated. In this Bill, we have the Government privileging the large corporates, the gigantic multinational corporations and the lobbying-driven interests of the financial sector over the empowering of communities, small businesses and co-operatives and the interests of the planet. It is the role of your Lordships’ House to turn that around.

I will briefly skip through some of the areas of the Bill and what could be improved. I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, about the Bill’s strange balance towards carbon capture and storage and hydrogen, even if you look just at the sheer number of clauses and words.

The planet does not give us a “get out of jail free” card from the climate emergency, but all too often it seems that carbon capture and storage is treated as that card. The sums for continuing to treat this planet as a mine and a dumping ground are made to add up with this magic, expandable—and unproven and uncertain at scale—addition, rather than there being any acknowledgement of the need to live within the physical limits of this planet. The maths gets particularly magical when it comes to biomass carbon capture and storage, where the trees that might, if they survive, store carbon in 100 years are treated as though they are delivered and locked down today. Part 2 of the Bill needs close attention from your Lordships’ House.

Part 3 covers hydrogen, which no doubt has a place in our renewable energy future as a method of storage at times of high generation and for use in hard-to-decarbonise sectors such as ocean and land freight and steel production. But the Government have failed to clearly identify these as the place for hydrogen. The Bill seems to point towards its use in home heating, where it is grossly inefficient and definitely not the direction in which we should travel. Electrification is a more effective and far more energy-efficient method of displacing gas for most purposes.

I move on to another major part, Part 8 on energy-smart appliances and load control. We need to get away from thinking about the energy system as a tap that can carelessly be turned on and off at will. Indeed, we also need to think a great deal more about water conservation, addressing the ideas behind that metaphor. Energy use needs to be thoughtful. Is the energy we are using right now a good use of this scarce resource that, no matter how it is generated, will cause environmental damage? As many noble Lords have said, the best energy is the energy you do not need to use.

I will be interested to hear how many times we hear “world-leading” from the Minister, but where are the really simple measures in the Bill? I have talked about home energy efficiency and the energy efficiency of buildings so many other times, and I shall not run through that at length. In fact, with reference to Part 9 on the energy performance of new premises, all we need do is point to the healthy homes debate last Friday from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. We could take that wholesale and put it into the Bill. Why do we have office buildings with nobody in them but lights blazing all night? Why do we have so many invasive, unpleasant video advertising screens blaring at us from every public space? Those are the kinds of things that other countries have acted to control, to reduce energy demand for things we do not need. We need to see that happening.

Finally, skipping through even faster, Chapter 3 of Part 3 is on fusion energy. Oh dear. As long as I have been a grown adult, it has been only 20 years away, and I have been a grown adult for quite a long while. It is a noticeable contrast that this is in the Bill and onshore wind is not.

Clause 162 is on electricity storage; it is extraordinarily brief and sketchy. As I said in commenting on the references made by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, this is a crucial area, which surely needs more work. I invite noble Lords, people watching this debate, interested NGOs and campaign groups to contact me about what more we need to do in this area.

Finally—and I shall not major on this today, because the debates will also be held elsewhere—Part 12 addresses the civil nuclear sector and the whole idea of undersea nuclear waste storage. I ask the Minister how this squares with the 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and other Matter—known, neatly enough, as the London convention —which acknowledges the limited capacity of the oceans to assimilate wastes and render them harmless and their limited ability to regenerate natural resources. Originally, it only covered high-level radioactive waste, but it was amended in 1992 to ban the dumping of low- level radioactive waste as well; that is known as the 1996 London protocol. I note the statement signed by the Minister on the front of the Bill about environmental law, so I ask him how this proposal squares with that convention.