King’s Speech

Lord Mackinlay of Richborough Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con)]

My Lords, I start with compliments and thanks to all those who have given their maiden speeches today; I look forward to hearing much more from them. I put on record my registered interest that I am the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

I want to discuss electricity. Electricity accounts for 20% of the overall energy use in this country. The other 80% is oil, gas, kerosene and coal, or a bit of home wood-burning—and thank heavens we do that, because there are countless times when winter storms regularly bring down power lines for extended periods. One can lend a neighbour a bucket of logs but you cannot lend them a bucket of electricity.

On a particularly good day, when there is perfect wind and perfect sunshine, the renewables system that we have, and that is planned, will overproduce the 40 to 45 gigawatts that the country uses. But if it produces more, we have to pay for constraint payments. Unfortunately, most days are nothing like that. More payments are needed to encourage gas stations to turn up, and we pray that France has some nuclear power to spare or that other countries, via their interconnectors, have some spare capacity to export to us. Although we seem desperately concerned about where our domestic electricity comes from, we do not seem too concerned about where the interconnector electricity comes from, because when it comes from Germany and Belgium, it is broadly coal-produced.

The perversity we have seen is that the more renewables we have in the system, the higher the price we seem to pay for our electricity—and we are already paying one of the highest prices in the world. That is because we have two systems: the irregular renewables and the backup that has to be paid for as well. There is an absolute correlation: more renewables, more cost.

If the ambition is to have virtually all electricity produced by non-fossil fuel means by 2030 then I have a bridge to sell the Minister. We have the problem of night and the problem of the Dunkelflaute—a fantastic German word for the high-pressure system which often sits across the entirety of northern Europe, often for a week or more in the depths of winter, when it is both cold and very dark. We would therefore need to overproduce a lot of our renewables, so that we may store it.

How might we store it? We might look to Chinese-produced batteries and to cobalt produced by children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We could look at some untried systems, such as hydrogen or reservoirs that do not exist so that we can use hydro storage. All suffer from huge thermodynamic losses. That is just for electricity—that 20%; we have not even started to have an alternative to the 80% of energy from other sources. Hydrocarbons will be with us for a very long time yet, because there is no at-scale alternative to power jets to heat our homes and fuel our vehicles.

The recent Iran problem has proven some things. It has proven that there is an international price for LNG and it is pretty high, but there is not an international price for locally piped gas. Gas priced in the USA is infinitely cheaper than the LNG market and gas from Norway that we rely on is cheaper than LNG. It has certainly proven that energy security is valuable. It is absolute madness that we are considering cancelling or banning any future use of the North Sea while Norway goes gangbusters for it and we then buy from Norway.

There is a serious constitutional point that Parliaments cannot bind their successors, and that is for any legislation. I find it amazing that a Government who secured 18% of the support of this country can be allowed to consider such long-term legislation. I welcome any legislation, because it will allow me to highlight the problems of the UK’s energy security.