UK Decarbonisation and Carbon Capture and Storage
Debate between Carol Monaghan and Sammy Wilson(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Sammy Wilson
Of course the people who pay for that expensive investment are the taxpayers, because there is less money for other public services; electricity consumers; and workers who lose jobs in the industries that can no longer compete.
Sammy Wilson
No. I only have seven minutes and I do not want to rule out my hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), or I will get in his bad books.
My second point is on the action required to do what is envisaged. As has been mentioned, part of the infrastructure is in place, and we may well be able to use redundant oil pipelines, but they must be linked to power stations, which must be where the centres of population are. I am fairly sure that we do not want to build power stations where most pipelines come ashore, unless we mean to build a huge infrastructure to distribute the power. Environmentalists have not cottoned on to the point that the plan is like fracking in reverse. Instead of fracking to get gas out of the ground, we will pump gas into the reservoirs, with all the same implications, according to environmentalists, for stability and leakage.
We in Northern Ireland are going through a constitutional crisis because of a botched energy scheme. I do not think that that warranted the outcome, but nevertheless we are living with it. I want to hear from the Minister about four things related to that. First, what will the cost be? Secondly, if there are costs involved, who pays them? Thirdly, what about the incentive structures? It is not lost on anybody that even some producers of traditional energy are now running after all of these green schemes. Why? Because the lucrative incentives increase their profits and fill their coffers—we saw that with the scheme in Northern Ireland. Fourthly, what kind of regulatory framework will be put in place?
The Government are right not to go ahead with the second exercise until they are sure of the answers to those questions. Even more fundamentally, they must ask whether the impact of decarbonising the economy on consumers, workers, industry and investment is worth it.
Finance Bill
Debate between Carol Monaghan and Sammy Wilson(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Sammy Wilson
I will give way in a moment. Let me just finish the argument.
The renewables obligation is an obligation because the energy is more expensive. Indeed, the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s own estimation is that, by 2020, the cost of paying for expensive renewable energy, more and more of which is coming on to the grid, will be about £190 per household. At the same time, we in this House complain about fuel poverty, when one of the contributors to fuel poverty is the fact that we are orientating ourselves towards more expensive electricity generation. Only last week there were complaints about Tata Steel closing down its plant.
Sammy Wilson
I will give way in a moment.
High-energy users are increasingly finding that the United Kingdom is a place where energy is expensive—it costs jobs, it dips into people’s pockets and it causes fuel poverty. This is an issue that the Government are quite rightly addressing.
