Electricity: Decarbonisation

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Wednesday 21st December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Viscount is absolutely right—SMR technology is something that we are supporting. We have given hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of support to Rolls-Royce, which is looking actively at how it can roll that out. It has great potential for the future, both in this country and in its export capacity.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

Germany and France use compulsion to ensure that large buildings and building complexes such as car parks, industrial estates and retail parks install solar panels on their huge roofs. I do not think that we want compulsion in this country, but can the Minister assure the House that the department has a policy to ensure that this incredibly valuable opportunity to help save the planet is actually used across the nation, perhaps with incentives such as feed-in tariffs or grants?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I remind the noble Baroness that we have the smart export guarantee scheme to encourage precisely that. The good news is that we have already 14 gigawatts of solar installed capacity in the UK and a fourth CfD allocation round for another 2 gigawatts of ground-mounted solar awarded contracts. The Chancellor recently removed VAT on solar panels, and on solar panel and storage packages. We are doing a lot in this area. Solar is a cheap and versatile source of power, which we should encourage.