Revised Energy National Policy Statements

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I wish the Minister had shown me his speech before he gave it today, because I could have gone through it with a red pen. Repeating wishful thinking does not make it happen. “May” and “might” is not a policy, and I shall now describe what the Government’s energy policy should be. I am really happy to send it directly to the Minister, in case he is in any doubt about what I am saying.

If we had insulated Britain, people would not be choosing between heating and eating. If we had not “cut the green crap”, as Cameron said, over the past decade, we would be saving £2.5 billion off energy bills. If we had not had a Tory Government for the past 12 years, we would be doing a lot better than we are now.

Renewable energy was cheaper to produce than gas even before the big explosion of oil and gas prices in recent months. There is now a huge gap between what it costs to produce renewable energy and what it is sold for as part of the national grid. If renewables now dominated the energy sector in the UK, everyone would be buying electric hobs and ovens as gas prices soared and electricity prices continued to go down. Rich and poor would all be better off, and the planet would be better off; the only people not better off would be the fossil fuel companies such as Shell—but I think we can manage without their doing particularly well, personally.

We have the perverse situation where green consumers who want green energy are paying extra because we have an energy system dominated by fossil fuels. For example, if someone is selling electricity to the national grid, why are they getting only 5½p per kilowatt hour, when it is being sold back to them for 21p per kilowatt hour? I understand that operators have costs to pay, but those small-scale producers, those homeowners, ought to be getting at least twice what they are now. I have a lot of questions; that is the first.

If gas producers are pushing up the price of electricity, why are households with renewables not getting more for their investment? Why are the fossil fuel giants the ones being rewarded for destroying the planet and ripping off consumers? That is another question.

I know that the Conservative Party receives millions of pounds in donations from the oil and gas industry; we have discussed that in this Chamber before. For example, the Prime Minister got something like £2 million in donations from Russians, possibly oil and gas producers, since he became Prime Minister. The case for a dirty fuel tax is overwhelming, and I wish everyone in this House and this debate would support a move that benefits this planet and consumers. Perhaps that is another question: why not have a dirty fuel tax?

Unfortunately, we have a Government in the pay of the oil and gas industry who have agreed the price cap for consumers going up by 50% in April. By contrast, households in the feed-in tariff scheme selling electricity to the national grid are tied to the retail price index, which will go up by 7.5%. That is a decision by the Government; why is that?

The potential for solar on the rooves of houses, warehouses and shops is absolutely massive, and this is the year when the Government should be giving it the biggest push by upping the amount that people are paid. Getting solar panels on more rooftops could make us far less reliant on gas in future years. Removing the planning block on wind farms supported by their local community would stop reliance on foreign gas. In fact, bringing back all the “green crap” would make us more independent and energy secure.

It is progress—I will give the Government this credit—that the Government have removed the arbitrary cap on how large solar farms can be, but why are we still building new houses and warehouses without basics such as solar panels? Why are there any new houses being built that are not net producers of energy? That is another question. We know how to do it. We know that new houses in the decades to come will have to be built that way or retrofitted, so why do we not do it now? The clever engineers at the national grid say that they can be ready for net zero by 2025, so why cannot we make this happen sooner rather than later? That is another question.

Why can we not use the technology that we have to make renewables the dominant source of our electricity within the next three years? That is another question. Why can we not scale up the use of emerging technologies of battery storage and hydrogen production to capture all that renewable energy in a form we can use to power vehicles, houses and factories when we need it? If we show that solar panels are an investment that really pays off, then more people will see the logic of heat pumps earning them money back. Making Britain independent of foreign gas supplies is a side-benefit of going renewable, the main reason obviously being the climate crisis.

Greens are often accused of wishful thinking, but in my view, and in that of an increasing number of people, we are the realists. The reality is that we have the technology to reach net-zero carbon emissions in the next few years; what we do not have is the political will. The Government’s wishful thinking is that they can keep using oil and gas, even beyond 2050. Instead of using all the potential sources of renewables, they rely on non-existent “greenhouse gas removal technologies” —more wishful thinking—to square this circle in reaching net zero. This is the wishful thinking of politicians who have taken dirty money from the dirty-fuel industries. I am sure the Minister knows that Germany has just cancelled the Nord Stream 2 undersea natural gas pipeline and is saying that it will overhaul its energy supply strategy. I would so love the Government to do this, and I would give them full credit for it.

Another bit of wishful thinking is the Government’s approach to waste incineration, which has driven me mad since I was a councillor. It is good that the Government state:

“The amount of electricity that can be generated from EfW”—


or energy from waste—

“is constrained by the availability of its feedstock, which is set to reduce further by 2035 as a result of government policy.”

However, unless they stop local authorities building an excess of new incinerators across the country and signing up to legally binding contracts for the next 25 or even 35 years, the words have no meaning. Money talks, and the contracts require councils to burn and not recycle. In some areas, the amount of recycling is going down because of the incinerator contracts that councils have signed. Burning waste instead of recycling is bad for air pollution and, obviously, bad for the climate. Can the Government commit that they will not allow the import of waste from abroad for burning in UK incinerators?

I know that we had the debate on nuclear yesterday, where my noble friend Lady Bennett of Manor Castle demolished the Government’s arguments for it, but I will say now that nuclear is not needed. We are developing tidal and wave power. Houses leak less heat when they are insulated. We have more efficient batteries as well as the conversion to hydrogen gas. The storage of energy is becoming an everyday thing, whether that is in a car or a battery on the side of the house. In the coming decades, more and more houses and communities will become net producers of energy. Are we seriously expecting them to buy nuclear energy from Hinkley at three or four times the price they are producing it for themselves?

Nuclear is dangerous. It leaks; it produces waste that we do not know how to dispose of; and, above all, we have to build new plants on the coast in an age of rising tides. Every single IPCC report since 2007 has increased the worst-case scenario for sea levels. Sizewell C has a massive sea defence system at the height of 18 metres based on the 2018 IPCC analysis, but that worst-case scenario is already out of date this year. If we build nuclear stations, they will become islands awash with sea water.

The Government’s energy strategy needs to abandon the idea of balance based on dirty fuels, whether fossil or nuclear. It needs to do its bit to mitigate the climate emergency by fast-tracking the cheaper solutions of renewables and insulation. It needs to show some bravery and create a dirty-profits tax that will encourage clean energy. In short, the Green national policy on energy would be good for the planet, good for consumers and independent of Russian gas and the flux of world prices.