Onshore Wind Energy

Debate between Charles Hendry and Graham Stuart

Thursday 10th February 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Charles Hendry)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Walker. We could not have picked a better debate to have in this Chamber this afternoon. We have had a passionate debate, with displays of knowledge, strong opinions and good humour. The speeches, of which I did not agree with every single word and paragraph, have shown this House in a very good light because of its determination to deal with such a challenging issue. I absolutely join others in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) on securing and delivering this debate.

Most of us, I think, share the same objectives. We believe that renewable energy is necessary for our energy security and for environmental reasons and that the view of local communities is vital in deciding where wind farms should be located. I want to look at both sides of that equation, to address what I think has been the democratic deficit and to show that wind farms can bring real benefits to communities as long as they are in the right place.

There is no doubt that the UK must become a low-carbon economy. We must decarbonise our electricity supply, which will be a massive challenge for us. It will cost us something in the region of £200 billion over the next 10 to 15 years. Our old coal plant has to close not because of CO₂ emissions but because of sulphur emissions. Our old nuclear plant is coming to the end of its physical life and running out of fuel, so we have no choice but to rebuild our energy infrastructure. Much of that work and the decisions on investment will need to come in the course of this Parliament. I completely support the comments of my hon. Friends the Members for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans), for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay) and for South Northamptonshire that this would have been a much easier challenge had we not had this legacy of failing to secure more of that investment over recent years. However, that does not mean that we have to pull back from such a challenge; we must show a determination to take it forward. There will be a dramatic change in the way in which we generate electricity, and that will bring challenges and disadvantages. We must ensure that we drive forward with this agenda if we are to secure our climate change and energy security goals.

We must consider the time scale. If we push the button today to start the construction of a new nuclear plant, and EDF decided that it wanted to go with Hinkley Point, it will still be towards the end of the decade before the plant can come on stream. We have allocated £1 billion to carbon capture and storage, which is more than any Government anywhere in the world have given to a single plant. However, it will still not be commercially at scale until the end of the decade. The technologies that others have talked about, such as the roll-out of offshore wind, have significant costs. The costs may come down, but as we go further out—I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) accepts this—waters become deeper and the installations more challenging, which, in turn, will push up costs. Although we want to see a broad mix of technologies, we must recognise that there is a real urgency to construct plant now, so that we can meet the challenge of the old plant that is coming out of commission.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) was right when he talked about the need for common sense—sadly, he is not here to hear my response. Common sense tells us that we need a balance of technologies; we need to ensure that we have new nuclear within the mix. We have continued much of the work that was started by the previous Government. We need to have clean coal and a broad mix of renewable technologies. This is not a case of saying that we should only have onshore wind. There will be a real drive for offshore wind and for biomass. We will take forward renewable heat issues. For example, ground source heat pumps, which were mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire, will be an integral part of the renewable heat incentive.

Common sense dictates that we should consider our own natural resources. We have the strongest wind resource anywhere in Europe. To turn away from that and say that we should not be using it would be a serious mistake by Government, and one that we are not prepared to make.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend the Minister give way?

[Charles Hendry]

We have had many contributions, so I hope that my hon. Friend understands that it will be difficult to respond to them fully if I start taking interventions.

Common sense also tells us that if we are to make the right decisions on our energy security and ensure that future generations look back and say that we did the right thing, we have to put new plant somewhere. During the debate, we have heard a lot of calls about why constituencies are not right for certain types of new development, but, with the honourable exception of the hon. Member for Workington (Tony Cunningham), I have not heard anyone saying, “I don’t want wind turbines, but I do want something else.” No one has volunteered for a new nuclear plant. No one has volunteered for a new gas plant, a coal plant with carbon capture or a biomass plant. If we do not put them anywhere, we cannot survive on invisible electricity. We all want the switches to work when we push them on, but we do not think that we need to see where the energy is being generated. Energy plants need to be sited in appropriate locations, and common sense tells us that that is the right way forward.

We have carefully considered the contributions that different technologies can make. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) will understand that much of the cost that we are considering—the increase in costs for consumers—is based on an oil price of $80 a barrel. Everything changes when oil is $100 a barrel. The central strategy of the American Administration is based on oil at $113 a barrel. At that price, the move to a low-carbon economy brings real benefit to consumers because fuel costs would be lower than they would have been had their supply been based purely on hydrocarbons. We should be in no doubt of the important contribution that renewables can make towards our security of supply and low-carbon objectives. There is a range of different ways in which we can meet the challenge. After this debate, people can go on to the DECC website and look at our 2050 pathways calculator. We can tap in for ourselves and see what keeping our lights on does to carbon emissions. We are not wedded to one approach on the various technologies, but we do want to create an environment where people can see for themselves what will be the best technologies.

As for the suggestion that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Cambridgeshire made, we will not simply go down the route of targets. Targets alone do not deliver anything. Government must have a determination to show how targets will be met, which is why we will put in place road maps so that people can see what is happening and how it is taking place.

We will be taking forward this matter in the most robust way. We also recognise that as a result of the investment that has already been made in wind turbines, some 5.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions were avoided in 2009. That is the equivalent of the total annual emissions of the bus transportation fleet in this country, which starts to show the contribution that such technology is making.

Many of my hon. Friends have talked about the intermittency of wind, but that is an issue with which technology can increasingly deal. It is not about having a whole fleet of coal-fired power stations standing by to be pumped up into action when the wind does not blow. Let us consider the scope for pumped storage—an electricity interconnector to Norway, perhaps, or a new one into France that builds into its nuclear capacity—and the work that is being done on battery technologies and on a whole range of new technologies that will mean that the power can be there when we need it rather than when the resource happens to blow. That will be one of the big changes that we see coming through in this decade. The issue of intermittency will become one that can be fully addressed.

Regarding security of supply, we also need to recognise that when Sizewell B—our most modern nuclear plant—did not operate for seven months last year wind was powering 800,000 homes in this country during that time. So it is not a case of one technology or another. The core to a sensible energy strategy is ensuring that we have the right balance of different technologies within it.

However, we must change the way we go about achieving that balance and that is what I will focus on for the rest of my remarks. We have heard very sincere views expressed during this debate and I completely understand the views that my hon. Friends and others have expressed. But let me reaffirm the Government’s commitment to reform the planning system to ensure that communities have more ability to determine the shape of the places in which they live. Many of the changes will come through the Localism Bill, which has been discussed in Committee today.

We will abolish the regional spatial strategies and their top-down regional energy targets. Members have talked today about how planning applications have been overturned on appeal and granted on appeal. It will be much more difficult for applications to go through on that basis if the regional energy targets are taken out of the mix. Responding to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Cambridgeshire, I would say that people can already look to the cumulative effect that exists. However, I do not think that we want to go down the route of saying that each constituency should be generating energy only for its own needs and no more, because that would conflict with the principle that these facilities should be put in the areas that are most appropriate.

We are introducing provisions for projects to be submitted to local planning authorities, so that developers will have to show that they have worked with communities to develop their planning applications. That will help to develop a better approach regarding these applications, so that more of them can go through with planning consent being given locally rather than having to go to appeal.

We are introducing neighbourhood planning, to enable communities to draw up neighbourhood plans to shape the development in their own locality and to permit development without the need for planning applications. In addition, we are of course abolishing the Infrastructure Planning Commission.

I do not think that it is right to go down the route of having specific distances between onshore wind farms and residences. The way that such distances have been interpreted in Scotland and Wales is not actually the way that they have been enforced in those countries. However, the challenge that I face with regard to that issue is that very often we would find brown industrial land—a brownfield site—that we would all believe was an appropriate place for a wind turbine, but if one were to say that the presence of one house near to that turbine, within a distance of 1 km or 1.5 km, could stop that development from happening that would prevent us from using some brownfield sites, which could be well used in that respect.

The new planning framework will be a concise and more strategic document, which will bring together much of the work in this area to provide much greater clarity. It will provide much greater transparency, to ensure that local authorities can take well-informed decisions.

We are also looking at some of the other issues that have been raised today. We are reviewing how noise is monitored and how flicker is assessed, and we will publish the results of those reviews during the next months so that work on addressing those issues can be developed.