Great British Energy Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 17th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that intervention. It reveals the importance of having more than one debate about community energy that he has now said that twice. I beg to move.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I will speak to my Amendment 46A and to Amendment 46, to which I have added my name. I also support Amendments 50 and 51A in this group, among others. I tabled Amendment 46A because I want to ascertain from the Minister whether this was something that GB Energy would or could be doing. As drafted, this amendment, very simply, requires Great British Energy to deliver a public information and engagement campaign on the work it is doing as part of the transition to clean energy—about renewables, reducing greenhouse gas, improving energy efficiency and contributing towards energy security.

The first inquiry that I was part of in the then newly established Environment and Climate Change Committee, which was under the wonderful chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, was on public engagement —or, to be quite honest, after many months of looking at it, the lack of it. Shortly after that inquiry, the Skidmore review also identified that public engagement is the missing piece of the puzzle. I am really not sure how much the dial has moved since then in this Government and certainly in the previous one. With GBE being a government-owned company, we could decide here and now, today, that the Government are going to take an active role in this; I think, and many others agree, that this would have a very beneficial knock-on effect.

The reason it is important may not be abundantly obvious at first, so I shall just lay out why I believe it is crucial. As we found on the committee, 32% of emissions reductions up to 2035 rely on decisions by individuals and households, while 63% rely on the involvement of the public in some form or another. We need to tell the public what we are doing and why we are doing it. We know that the public support the transition to net zero. Even last week there was a new poll that found that across all the major parties there was a high amount of support for anything to do with the environment. But you cannot expect people to support something if they do not know the reasons or what it is going to mean for them. We are not shepherds herding sheep, but we need to explain why it is happening,

I have real faith that the public will largely—if not exclusively—support all the energy infrastructure that we need to decarbonise the grid, including pylons wherever they have to be put, and they will be up for getting EVs and charging them in the middle of the night at times when electricity is abundant. They will do all these things because if they can buy into the common good, then you are in a win-win situation. But we must engage them, and the continued absence of a public engagement strategy leaves lots of space for lots of very negative voices to chip away with misinformation about why we do not need to do this and how we are not really in a climate emergency. Explaining these changes and how they are going to come in is crucial to secure public consent and address all the concerns that both the public and too many sections of the media, sadly, have.

I also fully support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, who made a wonderful introduction to it. I just add that with such little accountability, as the Bill stands, and as the Minister has said, we are not going to see a draft strategic priority statement before the Bill passes. It is important that there is some constraint around what the statement includes. The contents of this amendment are fully consistent with the objects in Clause 3 but correct a wrong area where GB Energy has the ability to invest in a wide range of “things or areas” but has no long-term security of knowing roughly what its strategic priorities will be.

I do not believe that this is too prescriptive. It seems to be wholly consistent with everything I have heard the Minister say in this House—and, indeed, the Secretary of State in the other place. I challenge the Minister to come up with something that he thinks GB Energy ought to have a role in, either now or in the future, that does not feasibly come under the list in this amendment.

It has to be said that my amendment is broad, so a few points apply to both it and the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Young. I will say a few words on emissions reductions. This has to be the overarching purpose, which, from conversations we have had with the Minister, I think is the case. But it is important that as a principle it is a publicly funded company which is not at present aligned to our emissions reduction targets. We should have no issue in including this in the Bill as its priority.

Everything to do with energy efficiency must be an area where GBE has a meaningful contribution by bringing in investment. The CCC has highlighted that we are really behind and that progress is slow. The warm homes plan—which I greatly welcome; indeed, I tabled an amendment to the last Energy Bill, now an Act, which included a warmer homes and business plan—aims to see 300,000 homes upgraded over the next year. I ask the Minister whether his department has yet produced a credible plan for the year after that. I am thinking particularly about the target to reach 600,000 heat pump installations by 2028.

These are large numbers. I remind noble Lords that we have 29 million homes in this country—more each year—which at present are likely to need retrofitting. As for security of the supply, I understand the Minister sees this as critical to what GB Energy will achieve. Indeed, his department’s 2030 clean power target, which this Bill helps to achieve, will mean more renewable energy. There should be no issue about including this as well. I also include community energy, which I can see has had a lot of airtime already. That is really important for bringing the public along on our journey, because if you can look out of your window and see a turbine and think, “That is powering and heating my home” or “The solar panels on my roof are feeding into the grid as well as cooking my dinner”, we will come up against a lot less opposition to all renewable developments.

Great British Energy Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise on the final note of the contribution of the noble Earl, Lord Russell, on those amendments to speak to my Amendment 91, which he just mentioned. It is in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff and the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Woodley. I know it enjoys support from all parts of your Lordships’ House. It would insert the following new clause after Clause 7:

“Within six months of a designation under section 1(1) coming into effect, Great British Energy must publish an assessment of the potential use of tidal barrage projects to support decarbonisation of the energy sector”.


That sits comfortably with the other amendments in this group. I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, said about the use of hydrogen, what the noble Earl, Lord Russell, said about heat pumps, and what I think my noble friend Lady Boycott will say about biomass.

I also thank the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, with whom I have already had one meeting—he promised that at Second Reading and I am grateful to him for it. It is partly about whether we can reduce reliance on forms of energy that come with a price tag connected to slave labour in places such as Xinjiang. If one is to stop using sources that have a human rights dimension, we have to find alternatives. In a way, that is what these amendments seek to do: to look at what some of the other alternatives may be. I also know that the Minister has kindly agreed to meet with me and the metro mayor for Merseyside, Steve Rotheram, along with his noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, in due course, so we can talk further about the Mersey barrage, which I will come back to in the course of my remarks.

The noble Lord, Lord Naseby, talked about security and diversity—very important concepts that have come out in all the previous groups we have talked about. We should make sure that we are not so dependent on any one source that anyone else can then hold us to ransom. I would add to security and diversity the need for more reliance in the United Kingdom on ourselves and a reduction in dependency on countries such as the People’s Republic of China or Russia. I think all of us were horrified to see the dependency that Germany had at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and we must learn the lessons of that.

Why tidal energy? I am grateful to the House of Lords Library for producing some notes on this for me. However, I have been interested in this issue since the 1980s, when I served in another place on the Environment Select Committee, but also because I founded the Mersey Barrage All-Party Parliamentary Group. This idea had not come out of the blue. In fact, tidal barrages have been around for many years. The first was thought of by the French in 1921. It did not come to pass until 1966, when the La Rance barrage, quite close to Saint-Malo in Brittany, opened. So this is not a fantasy or something out of dystopian fiction; they have been done and here are decades of experience.

Tidal energy could be a crucial pillar for delivering the objectives of the energy Bill. It would strengthen the UK’s renewable energy mix, complement intermittent sources such as wind and solar, drive the green industrial strategy by fostering innovation, create jobs and support regional economic growth. The United Kingdom is uniquely positioned to be a global leader in tidal energy.

We can learn from projects such as the La Rance estuary barrage in France, but we can also learn—I think the noble Lord, Lord Howell, will be particularly interested in this—from the experience of South Korea, where the largest operating tidal power station is based: the Sihwa Lake project, which produces 254 megawatts of energy. It is a 43.8 kilometre artificial lake constructed as a land reclamation project in 1994. It used a 12.7 kilometre seawall at Gyeonggi Bay and, after some false starts, if you look at its history, nevertheless, construction led to 552.7 gigawatts of electricity generated by the tides. I asked what that really means to a layman like me, and I was told that it is the equivalent of 862,000 barrels of oil, or 315,000 tonnes of CO₂, equivalent to the amount produced by 100,000 cars annually. It has 10 water turbine generators, enough to support the domestic needs of a city with a population of about half a million. After some false starts initially, as I said, it led to some very positive developments in the ecosystem there as well.

That neatly takes me to the Mersey barrage, an idea that, as I said, has been around for over 30 years now. There has recently been a new public consultation, which closed last month. I know that when the Metro mayor comes to meet the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, there will be an opportunity to discuss the findings of that.

None of these things, whatever energy we produce, comes with no downside—we all accept that—but there are surprisingly few downsides to the use of tidal barrages. Merseyside would argue that the green industrial revolution could be started off there, and Britain’s renewable energy coast could be there, on the River Mersey and in the Irish Sea. It would power hundreds of thousands of homes and create many jobs. I visited Cammell Laird a few weeks ago to see the wonderful renaissance that has taken place there, alongside the extraordinary renaissance of the Port of Liverpool; these are big success stories that need to be understood and learned more widely. Listen to what the mayor himself says: “There is a strong strategic case for taking forward a Mersey tidal power project and we are developing detailed plans for how it could be made a reality. I also believe there is a strong moral case for it too—our planet’s future depends on it.”

As people such as the noble Lord, Lord West, will confirm, the Mersey has a huge tidal range—green energy to power every home in the city region for more than 100 years. Surely that is something worth giving serious consideration to. It is predictable, so it complements offshore wind and solar energy; but it is predictable in a way that they are not always. It should be a key part of the diversity that we heard about earlier. It is a well-established technology with minimal decommissioning needs. I would also point the Minister to other experience, not just overseas. The Orbital O2 project in Orkney is the world’s most powerful underwater turbine: 2,000 homes there receive their energy from it, and more than 2,200 tonnes of carbon are cancelled as a result of the work of the project.

Then, of course, there is the Severn barrage project, which has been around a long time and has had many advocates, not least on the Official Opposition Benches over the years. I know that some noble Lords, one of whom cannot be here today, are great supporters of it, as are some of my noble friends. This is an issue that has captivated the party of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, who is in his place, and others. The idea was dropped back in 2010, but it was resurrected in 2024, with New Civil Engineer reporting that a new independent commission had been established. It estimates that 7% of the United Kingdom’s electricity could be generated, and challenges such as cost, risk and environmental impacts, which have previously halted major barrage projects, are believed to be capable of being overcome by the use of new technologies.

The UK could be in a position to be a global leader. I certainly think this is worthy of exploration, and that is all the amendment commits us to doing. This should not be seen as some sort of science fiction, as some projects undoubtedly appear to be from time to time. It is not unrealistic, and there are already very good examples, which I have cited. It is worth looking at further, and if the Minister cannot support the amendment, I hope he feels that the principle of delving further into the potential of barrages should be part of what Great British Energy seeks to achieve.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, said about tidal power. I have followed what has happened on the Severn, and it is terrific to see that it is now coming back into play. Tides are probably our most reliable power source in the UK. There will always be a tide, when there might not be some wind.

I support pretty much all the amendments in this group which look at diversifying the sources of energy—all of what the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, said. I shall speak specifically to Amendments 30 and 33, which would exclude biomass from the definition of clean energy, and there are many reasons for this. Over the past few years, it has become completely clear to me and, I think, to many other noble Lords—including the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, who is not in his place, and who spoke about this issue during a Question of mine a couple of weeks ago—that while biomass is okay on paper, in theory, and on a very small scale in practice, it is not at all okay on the big scale at which we practise it. We cannot go on using it to reach net zero. I do not know whether noble Lords saw the “Dispatches” and “Panorama” programmes; also, an Ofgem investigation has found that biomass energy generators in the UK have “misreported”—that is not my word—the data on where they get their wood from. In other words, it is not waste wood. The idea was that offcuts and waste wood were used and burnt. That in itself was a fallacy, because the burning of wood releases so much carbon, but the story gets worse.

As the Wildlife and Countryside Link put it:

“Bioenergy which burns woody biomass actively harms nature restoration efforts and will not contribute to GB Energy’s goals of clean energy, energy independence, nor cheaper energy bills.”


This is before you get to the negative health impacts of sourcing and burning biomass, the damage it is doing to the renewable energy brand, or, importantly, habitat destruction, which so often gets missed in the race towards net zero.

I want to raise a couple of wider bioenergy issues. I am really worried by the idea of BECCS—bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, which the Government seem intent on believing is an inherently negative emission technology. Let us look a little further. The assumption is based on the idea that all biomass inputs are waste—which not even our sustainability requirements require—or are balanced out by regrowth. If it was entirely the former, let us be clear that burning waste wood releases more emissions than natural degradation, through which carbon is absorbed by the soil—and that is before you get to all the other environmental benefits of leaving forestry residue in the forest where it belongs. If we assume the latter to be true, it is only the case after several decades and, again, only if the trees are actually replanted. In short, there is no way to verify that biomass is carbon neutral at any point.

I feel that this has gone so far that it would even be worth the department itself sending someone out to where these pellets are apparently sourced from—in North America and in the province of British Columbia. Perhaps there is something that DESNZ or its predecessor, BEIS, has already done, which I have heard rumours about. I would be very grateful if the Minister could tell me if this has happened or is planned.

Biomass is not carbon negative. I understand that the Minister’s department baked BECCS into our carbon budgets over a decade ago and that they are ongoing in future carbon budgets, but the logic is flawed and, at its worst, truly deceitful. Just because we classify something as renewable or carbon negative does not mean that it is. We do not have time to grow the trees to absorb the carbon we are pushing into the atmosphere. As the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said, we are cutting trees down in North America and Canada, turning them into wood pellets, shipping them by various means back across Canada and the Atlantic, often to a power plant in Yorkshire where they are belting out carbon into the atmosphere, and we are calling this clean and renewable. My Lords, it is not.

My question for the Minister—apart from whether he is on this mission to find out the extent of this—is whether he will rule GBE out of involving itself with biomass power generation, and will he come back to me on what investigations his department has done in the past few years? Can we be honest at this point and remove the absurd assumption that biomass is inherently carbon-neutral at the point of use?

Drax Power Limited: Ofgem Investigation

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Boycott]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of Ofgem’s investigation into Drax Power Limited, which found “Drax misreporting data” and “being unable to provide Ofgem with sufficient evidence … to support the reliability of its profiling data reporting of forestry type”, and what plans they have to ensure that companies receiving public subsidies are not able to claim them without concrete evidence.

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

My Lords, Ofgem’s investigation found that Drax had failed to report data accurately. Data misreporting is a serious matter and the Government expect full compliance with all regulatory obligations. Drax’s £25 million redress payment underscores the robustness of the regulatory system.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer. KPMG was commissioned by Drax to look into the results; this was done in secret at its behest, and it was reported in this week’s issue of Private Eye. It corroborated that Drax had provide inaccurate data to Ofgem and that there was evidence of

“material financial misstatement … fraud or misconduct”.

Therefore, we cannot trust Drax to be honest or to behave honourably. Will the Minister use his good offices to put an end to the enormous subsidy that we pay to Drax on an annual basis, which, according to one of the latest adverts put out by an environment group, is costing every individual in this country £100 a day?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, on the issue of data, I have checked with Ofgem. At the moment, it has no reason to think that Drax is not compliant, but it will not hesitate to act if required. On the question of subsidy to Drax, the noble Baroness is referring to the ROC system of subsidies, which the last Government oversaw for many years. The ROC comes to an end in 2027. The last Government issued a consultation on whether there should be transitional subsidy arrangements. We are considering the results of that work at the moment.

King’s Speech

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to be speaking in this first day of debate of this new Government. Like all noble Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. to their new jobs. We are in good hands.

There was so much to welcome in the gracious Speech, especially hearing that the Government recognise the climate crisis that we face and are taking legislation forward on improving water and our energy. This is a serious Government who will govern seriously. What a relief.

However, I have a few points. Chatham House says in a new report on the global food system that the primary driver of biodiversity is our global food system, which will continue to accelerate unless we change the way we produce food. Further destruction of our ecosystems and habitats will not just weaken out ability to grow food but increase emissions, as we continue to turn land into a carbon emitter rather than a carbon sink. We do not need to look far to see that, globally, subsidised systems support monocultures, deforestation and the use of chemicals, all of which weaken soils and destroy nature, while producing increasingly unhealthy foods that have led to diet-related illness becoming the number one cause of ill health and premature death across the world.

In the UK, we are doing better. In fact, the only benefit I can see from Brexit is that we have a new way of rewarding farmers. Instead of just a blanket payment for the amount of land that you own, that payment now goes to compensate farmers for their efforts and successes in restoring wildlife and nature. This is great stuff, and I hope that the new Government get to grips with many of the problems currently plaguing the system, as many Peers have mentioned.

However, when the Environment Act was originally debated, I argued, and I still remain of the view, that growing food sustainably is also of massive benefit to nature. I understand the arguments that growing wildflowers down a strip by a field does not make you actual money, whereas any food has a market price. Sustainable farming enhances the natural ability of soil to regenerate, to remain compact in the face of floods and to sequester carbon, as its roots systems and mycorrhizal fungi grow strongly underground. However, it can take time and money to transition, which is why too many farmers are still nervous about doing it and so continue to farm in old-fashioned ways. Can the Government help with this transition, especially if we now have a goal of 50% of our food being grown here. We want it grown properly.

Just as challenging in the years to come will be not just what we eat but where we grow it. As the world warms and places from which we now routinely import food start to get too hot or too dry, we must look at our own food security and using our own land more efficiently. So I am a little concerned about the mention of a Bill on “sustainable aviation fuel”. Although some if this might be needed, and knowing that this is in response to previous recommendations by the CCC, I hope that as part of the debates we can have a serious conversation about aviation demand, because another CCC recommendation is an end to all airport expansion.

The CCC said just today in its progress report that, while emissions fell due to the pandemic—not surprising as we could not go anywhere—

“demand continues to grow quickly, presenting a risk that it may increase beyond pre-pandemic levels in the next year”.

It is clear that it cannot be left to grow exponentially; this risks putting land in direct competition. It also raises the issue of fairness: financing ought not to come from general taxation. Those who pollute—those who choose to fly the most—should pay.

Tom Heap, the producer of “39 Ways to Save the Planet” on Radio 4, as well as being a regular “Countryfile” presenter, has been working on this. He told me the other day that, if one wanted to run the current aviation industry on biofuels, it would require the annual harvest of a forest five times the size of Egypt every year.

To illustrate quite how inefficient some of these fuels are in terms of land use, biodiesel, which comes from rapeseed oil, requires 884 square metres to produce a megawatt hour of energy, whereas concentrating solar photovoltaic panels demand only 22 square metres when installed on towers, 19 when installed on the ground and three when on roofs. Even the much-hyped miscanthus, which at least has the benefit of regrowing after we chop it down, produces only 158 megawatt hours for every 158 square metres. It is important to remember that all these crops are monocrops; they do not encourage biodiversity. The CEO of Rolls-Royce told Sky News recently that the creation of liquid hydrocarbon fuel from biofuels was impossible to scale, due to its extraordinary land-take and the huge biodiversity challenge.

By contrast, solar or wind—I strongly welcome the end of the de facto onshore wind ban—are very good users of land. New energy generators can make the land provide not one service but two or three. Animals can graze near solar panels and around wind turbines, biodiversity can flourish and horticulture can happen. It need not be one or the other; in fact, it must cease to be one or the other. I urge the Government to stop looking at this wasteful use of our money and look at using land in a much more creative way.

I happened to bump into our new Science Minister, the wonderful noble Lord, Lord Vallance, in the Lobby this morning, when he was coming in. I voiced my concerns about aviation fuel and he said, “New technologies are on the way”. I would be glad to think that but, for very long, we have thought that technology will always get us out of the mess we are in. How about also considering flying less, frequent fliers paying more and public transport stepping up several gears to get us to, say, Edinburgh?

Finally, I turn to an area that was not specifically mentioned in the Speech: community energy. This sector has been somewhat strangled by government policies lately but, last year, I tabled two amendments to the now Energy Act, which were supported across this House and in another place—in fact, we passed them here twice—which would have unlocked the barriers that the sector currently faces. They were supported by the Labour Front Bench and the now Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero went so far as to table similarly worded amendments, so I am super hopeful that progress can be made here.

In my time serving on the Environment and Climate Change Committee we looked at how well we were encouraging people to change from traditional boilers to heat pumps and ground source heating. It seemed completely ridiculous that the Government were not actively encouraging, say, a group of households living in a terrace, as lots of us do, to pool their individual grants and, between them, create a single, affordable source to which everybody was connected. It seems easy to do, so I hope the Government will.