Energy: Gas Supplies

Baroness Worthington Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marland]

I obviously recognise his strong track record of expertise. It is normally about this time of year that the House has a searching Question from the noble Lord and I am grateful for it. I can also assure him that this Government are deeply committed to storage. We inherited seven storage units for 16 days’ supply, we have four under construction and we have granted planning permission for another nine storage units. We take this matter seriously.

As for the other question about European gas storage compared with ours, we have to remember that 40-50 per cent of our gas supply comes from our own resources, 20 per cent comes from a dedicated pipeline from Norway and we have a good relationship with Qatar, with a guaranteed 10 per cent from there. So we are not in the same position as, perhaps, Germany, which is dependant upon the Eastern bloc for its supply. We get less than a half of one per cent from that source.

[Baroness Worthington]

Does the Minister agree that one way of reducing our dependence on imported gas is to invest in renewable forms of heating fuels? When will the long-awaited renewable heat incentive be open for business? At this rate, it will not be ready for people to invest by next winter, let alone this winter.

[Lord Marland]

I think the noble Baroness touches on the problem of Europe agreeing our tariffs for the renewable heat incentive where we propose aggressive and supportive tariffs for people in biomass and creating biomass boilers. They were rejected by the European Union, which said that they were unfair. We have looked at them again in earnest and certainly by the end of November we shall have responded to the EU with a negotiated position. We are deeply committed to it. As the noble Baroness rightly pointed out, it is fundamental to our energy security supply that we wean ourselves off oil in particular and coal, which are no longer supplied by ourselves.