David Mowat
Main Page: David Mowat (Conservative - Warrington South)(11 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
I beg to move,
That this House notes that both the Coalition Agreement and numerous ministerial statements have committed the Government to provide no public subsidy to new nuclear; further notes that negotiations are currently ongoing between the Department of Energy and Climate Change and new nuclear suppliers to fix the strike price in advance of the legislation on energy market reform; is concerned by wider issues of subsidy and transparency and in particular that this process pre-empts the legislation; is further concerned that new evidence suggests that this constitutes an unjustifiable subsidy to a mature industry; and therefore calls on the Government to pause the process so that the Public Accounts Committee can examine whether the contract for difference being offered for new nuclear power generation offers genuine value for money.
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for generously allowing time for this debate. This motion is not about whether nuclear power is a good thing in principle; nor is it about whether the Government’s whole energy policy is on the right track. For the record, I think it is. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State—he has just taken his seat—should be congratulated on the green deal, the world’s first green investment bank, the carbon floor price and most of the energy market reforms contained in the Energy Bill, as should his predecessor. It may be a bit optimistic to say this now, but I hope that Chris Huhne’s time in this House will be remembered for the great work he did in shaping a greener future for the UK.
The Department has chosen a particular method for locking in green investment: the contract for difference. Contracts for difference are normally a kind of bet on future asset prices that might be expected to carry some kind of health warning, to the effect that those participating in them could lose a significant amount of money. In this case, of course, the potential loss is to British energy bill payers, as the contracts for difference will effectively guarantee a certain price for energy generated from particular sources even if the market price falls lower than that price. The difference will not then be paid by us as taxpayers, but as energy consumers through our electricity bills.
I would still say, so far, so good. There are a number of justifications for contracts for difference—for taking that risk on behalf of energy consumers—in the case of renewables and carbon capture and storage, and not just because they are low carbon. First, these are new technologies, at least at scale, that represent a significant risk to investors precisely because they are new and still emerging. Investors in such a market need significant reassurance and reduced risk, and contracts for difference can do just that by promising predictable revenue streams which will in turn make it easier and cheaper for energy generators or CCS developers to secure finance. In the longer run, encouraging renewables will also help consumers, because the cost of renewable generation is on an historic downward trend, unlike fossil fuels or nuclear. Once established, renewables and CCS should provide a cheaper and more diverse range of energy supplies that will make British energy supply much more resilient in the face of fluctuating global energy prices.
The second reason why renewables and CCS need this kind of price-based support is that they include many new and diverse technologies: from good old hydroelectric to onshore and offshore wind; from geothermal to heat exchangers in the air and in the oceans; from photovoltaics to concentrated solar power; from tidal flow turbines to barrages, tidal fences, tidal lagoons and wave power; from biogas and biomass to anaerobic digestion and more exotic forms of energy from waste, such as gas plasma. We might even one day be able to add artificial photosynthesis and who knows what else to that list. Government should not pick winners from among these myriad emerging technologies, let alone the various suppliers and developers. Price-based contracts for difference, properly negotiated, offer a means by which technologies and developers can be supported, but still be incentivised to keep on reducing costs and become more competitive.
David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)
I am listening very carefully to my hon. Friend’s argument as to why contracts for difference should apply to those technologies and not nuclear. He says that Government should not be choosing winners and losers, and I agree. Does he therefore think that the contract for difference price—the strike price—should be the same for all the technologies he has just listed?
Martin Horwood
Clearly not, because in the case of onshore wind, for example, there are many competitive developers developing different varieties of technology. It is a competitive market still, in a way that nuclear, as I shall explain, is not.
The goal, of course, is to provide clean, sustainable and cheap energy while meeting challenging but critically important greenhouse gas reduction targets. Do these contracts for difference represent a subsidy? Well, as the Treasury has confirmed to me in a written answer, yes, of course they do. Every energy bill payer is a taxpayer in their time off; but subsidy is justified for renewables, for all the reasons I have given. However, would it not be extraordinary if into this exciting, young, diverse and competitive energy market, a 56-year-old freeloader—a tailgater, a leftover from another era—tried to slip unnoticed and pick up all the same kinds of advantages and support? Would it not be even more extraordinary if that old freeloader was not even represented by a diversity of competitive companies, but just one or two; and more extraordinary still if the most significant of those turned out to be the state-nationalised energy supplier of another country, already subsidised by its own taxpayers?
That is precisely what is happening with the nuclear industry, and what is more, the level of support—the precise contract for difference and the strike price for specific energy sources—is being negotiated behind closed doors as we speak, before the relevant legislation has even passed through this House. The details are set to be revealed to us only after the event—after the deal has been sealed.
Mr Wright
The hon. Gentleman mentions contracts for difference and he also did so in his speech. That is my major criticism of the Government, because when people are thinking about investing for 40 or 50 years it is important that we try to mitigate the risks as much as possible. That is presumably the rationale behind contracts for difference.
As I have said, I have a power station in my constituency and want another one, but we still have great uncertainty about how CFDs will operate, including about the length of contracts, how contracts will be allocated or paid for and the process for setting the reference and strike prices. In such circumstances, investors who want to invest for the long term are naturally jittery. In its report on planning for economic infrastructure last month, the National Audit Office identified policy uncertainty as a key risk, concluding that such uncertainty
“could result in project sponsors, lenders and contractors deferring or abandoning UK projects in favour of opportunities elsewhere. Financing charges for projects may rise as investors and lenders perceive policy uncertainty as a risk.”
That certainly seems to have happened in the nuclear sector, with the loss in recent years of E.ON, RWE and SSE, and now Centrica.
I mentioned that I was reading the Lex column in the Financial Times this week, and it concluded:
“low-carbon nuclear must be part of the global energy mix. If governments want to attract private capital, they must be more realistic about pricing, cost and regulation.”
That is as true for the UK sector as it is for the global energy mix.
David Mowat
I agree with just about everything the hon. Gentleman has said and would make the point that Hartlepool puts more into the grid than the entire onshore wind sector in this country. He is correct to make his points about up-front investment, but does he agree that the CFD structure, with a strike price lower than that agreed for wind, is the best way of achieving that?
Mr Wright
Let me make two points in response. The hon. Member for Cheltenham said that in many respects this is an either/or game and that we choose nuclear or renewables. In my area, which has a long and proud history of engineering, manufacturing and energy production, it is not an either/or game. We can have a fantastic offshore wind-processing facility in my constituency, where we have a great supply chain, as well as having nuclear. We can have a ready supply of school leavers to go into the energy engineering sector. I want the Tees valley to be a centre of excellence for energy.
The second point made by the hon. Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) is valid and goes back to what I was saying earlier. Investors are unclear about what is going on and there is no stability with CFDs. As the investment time scale lasts 40 years with up-front costs, that must be addressed.
The Government must act in a more focused way than they have in the past to provide clarity to investors for the long term. If we do not have that, our competitiveness as a modern economy and our ability to attract large-scale financing for such projects will be undermined still further. We will not be able to keep the lights on and stay competitive as a nation if the Government maintain their current approach and that is why I hope that they will address the risks today.
Mike Weatherley
The hon. Gentleman is entirely wrong, and I shall come on to the reasons for that later. Many alternatives from emerging markets must be considered, rather than the obsolete and declining markets.
We should try to keep as close to a free market as possible, whenever possible, rather than take the easy state intervention option. Indeed, my political hero, Sir Keith Joseph, emphasised that by saying that market competition
“contains within it the source of constant improvement”.
Any new subsidy to this mature market is an affront to that principle and will artificially restrict the growth and innovation of the sector in an age of feasible new green and renewable energy.
David Mowat
I, too, am a free marketer in general. In this case, however, if we leave it to the market alone, the answer will be coal or maybe gas. Does my hon. Friend not believe that carbon is a bad thing for society, that the Government must therefore intervene to put a price on carbon, and that the CFD structure that they are introducing is a mechanism for putting a price on carbon, which is good for us and good for the planet?
Mike Weatherley
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. If I may, I will ask him to listen to my concluding remarks, which will show conclusively that by not subsidising nuclear, we will have a greener economy, rather than a carbon-dependent one.
If new nuclear is unable to meet the free market test, showing that it is competitively viable in the long term, it should yield to other forms of energy, particularly green forms of energy. When it comes to striking a price now, there are so many unknown variables that this can be done only by accepting that any price agreed will need future Government support. Members in favour of nuclear seem to accept that, which is horrific, given the coalition agreement.
The first of these unknown variables is the decommissioning of nuclear power sites. Decommissioning is a multi-faceted and complex process in which costs are hard to estimate accurately. The Public Accounts Committee last week noted the huge decommissioning failures at Sellafield, where the clean-up will take 120 years and cost £100 billion—twice the original estimate.
David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am pleased to have the chance to speak in this debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) on securing it.
Before I begin my remarks, I want to address two of the points that the hon. Gentleman made. First, on the subsidy issue, of course it is true that we are paying more for nuclear than we would pay if we let the market ride, because the market would take us to coal, and if not coal, to gas. Whether we call that a subsidy or a price for carbon, I do not know. I personally believe that we must address the decarbonisation issue, that nuclear power is part of the solution, as is wind, and that the contract for difference mechanism is a way of acknowledging a price for carbon. If we want to call that a subsidy, I accept that.
Secondly, the hon. Gentleman said, as I have heard others say, that it is reasonable to subsidise new technologies such as wind, solar and all the rest, but not nuclear, which is an old technology dating back to 1956. That is a false argument. It is a little like saying that physics is an old technology because it started in about 1900 and we have had it for all that time. Nuclear is changing and evolving, just as wind power did. There are different types of nuclear power. Is thorium technology new, or are the different types of reactors new? It is a very difficult argument to maintain. If we are serious about decarbonisation, it is hard not to see nuclear as part of the solution.
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Does he agree that the latest design approved by the Office for Nuclear Regulation for the new reactors that EDF proposes to use shows that those reactors are more efficient than before, and so we are rewarding that investment in technology to ensure that we get more value for money?
David Mowat
My honest answer is that I do not know if they are more efficient. I assume that they are—why would they not be?
I am of the view that we should not go nuclear if there are low-carbon technologies that can outperform it at scale and within the time frames that we need, because I accept that there are issues with nuclear. For example, we have not solved the waste problem. The question for the House, though, is whether that problem is more severe than global warming. We must make choices. We need to decide whether the waste issue is containable—no pun intended—whereas the global warming issue is not containable. However, it is nonsense to pretend that nuclear is not part of the decarbonisation of the world.
Albert Owen
The hon. Gentleman is making a sensible and powerful argument. On waste, the House needs to recognise that we are talking predominantly about legacy waste that successive Governments have not dealt with but needs dealing with now. That waste comes not only from civil nuclear but from the defence industry and the health sector. On the other hand, we will be some 50 years into the future before anything of that kind comes out of a new-build nuclear power station.
David Mowat
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the issue of legacy waste is not relevant to this discussion, but neither is it a great advert for the nuclear industry. It is true that much of the waste that is causing the difficulties in Cumbria is military and health waste, rather than waste from nuclear power stations. However, it is also true that the old stations were not designed with the disposal of waste in mind and we are paying the price of that.
David Mowat
I have given way twice, so let me see how I get on and I will try to come back to the hon. Gentleman.
I support the broad thrust of the Energy Bill. The DECC assumption is that we need to construct 60 GW of capacity by 2035 and that up to a third of that will be nuclear. Much of the rest will be made up by renewables, including wind and biomass, but I am afraid that some of it will come from gas.
There are three competing targets in energy policy. The first is cost, which we talk about very little, the second is energy security and the third is decarbonisation, which we talk about a lot. I will say a little about each of those targets.
Cost matters and fuel poverty matters. We need to decarbonise our economy, but old people being cold and dying of hypothermia is not a price worth paying for that. We should be very circumspect about cost and we must consider the cost equation for the different technologies. I accept that the cost of renewables is coming down, albeit from a very high base. We also need to consider the cost to our industries. I gently tell the House that a large part of the GDP in the north comes from heavy industries. If we want to rebalance the economy, we must bear it in mind that GDP growth correlates with energy use. We will not achieve that aim if we have differentially higher energy prices. We must be careful about that.
The UK faces unique issues in respect of energy security. We have decided to decommission 20 GW of nuclear and coal capacity over the next five or six years. The figures vary depending on who looks at the matter and when, but by 2017 we will have a capacity excess of about 4%. That is dangerous and we need to address it. If it is not addressed in time, the default will be to use fossil fuel. Gas power is about the only thing that can be produced at scale quickly enough. We cannot build wind capacity at that level quickly enough.
We often talk as if this country is one of the worst performers in Europe on carbon, but both the absolute figures and the trajectory on carbon per head and carbon per unit of GDP show that the UK is one of the best performers of the major economies in Europe. I will not end the comparisons with Germany because it uses 20% more carbon per head and 23% more carbon per unit of GDP than us, and yet it has three to four times more renewables. Why is that? The answer is that it burns substantially more coal than us. The trajectory appears to show that it will burn yet more coal than it has in the past. The way to decarbonise is to get off coal, and nuclear power can be part of that.
What are our options? The first option is to use less power. I hope that the green deal works because there is no question but that it is the best thing that we can do. The option that I like least is imports. There is a risk that the Government will go down that route. The fastest growing source of electricity is imports coming in from France through the interconnector with Holland.
David Mowat
I am afraid that I cannot.
I am not very impressed by the interconnector with Ireland or with our building a big wind farm in the middle of Ireland and sending the jobs over there. Another option is gas. For pragmatic reasons, that will be part of the solution. It replaces coal and creates much less carbon.
I welcome the use of wind and solar energy. However, we debate these options as if they are mutually exclusive. If our 2050 target was to be met entirely by wind power, the 4,000 wind turbines that we currently have would have to be multiplied by a factor of about 30.
David Mowat
I will not give way. The hon. Lady might have wanted to talk about offshore wind. That could be part of the solution. However, these technologies have a lot of ground to make up on price.
Carbon capture and storage has been talked about a little. That is part of the solution. I regret that this country has not moved faster on CCS. One reason for that is that we have over-emphasised renewables because they are subject to an EU directive. Progress on CCS would not have counted towards that directive, even though it would have helped us to decarbonise.
I think that there are problems with the case for nuclear. As I said at the start of my remarks, the problem of waste has not been fixed. It is perfectly legitimate for people to think that that is a reason not to go ahead with new nuclear. However, I believe that the risks from waste are smaller than the risks from global warming and that we therefore need to decarbonise. I say to the Secretary of State that unless nuclear can prove that it has a cheaper strike price than other low-carbon technologies, there will be questions about going ahead with the deal. Although nuclear produces less carbon than renewable technologies—for example, it produces significantly less carbon per kilowatt-hour than solar—there is still the issue of waste. I do not know how the caps that have been put into the deal will work. The hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley) made the point that the probability of an accident is never zero. That is true, but it does not mean that we should never do anything.
Of course, nuclear provides base power, whereas renewables are intermittent. Even with the waste issue, I believe that we must move ahead with nuclear as part of the mix in the way that the Government are doing. I wish them luck with the negotiation, although I regret that they are negotiating with only one company. Frankly, the Labour party is the cause of that because it sold off vast tracts of our nuclear industry.
In my last 40 seconds, I will ask some questions of the Secretary of State. As I said, we now produce less carbon than most OECD countries and European countries. The Secretary of State must therefore be circumspect in ensuring that the cost of our electricity supply is competitive and that we do not move ahead a lot more quickly than the rest of Europe. As I said at the beginning in response to the hon. Member for Cheltenham, I do not understand why the contract for difference price for other low-carbon technologies is so much higher than that for nuclear. I will finally just say that—
Simon Hughes
The hon. Gentleman is being mischievous. He and I are on the same side in this argument, so he should love and care for his friends, and not seek to be rude. Indeed, the Welsh Labour party was desperately pleased that the new boundaries did not go through, so let us have a little less of the attack on us.
We have our position that we negotiated in the coalition agreement; that is fine and we will deliver on it. However, my job and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham is to hold my right hon. Friend the Minister, the Department and the Government to account. That is why we need to nail what is currently going on and stop—either in the Energy Bill, which is in Committee and will be coming back here, or elsewhere—any mechanism whereby power is given to Ministers to do deals with companies such as EDF that could produce the sort of hidden subsidy mentioned by the hon. Member for Newport West.
The hon. Gentleman referred to Professor Tom Burke, who is a friend and constituent of mine, and I had a long and up-to-date conversation with him on this issue only this weekend. I am clear that the figures cited by the hon. Gentleman are the figures we are talking about. The reality is that if the strike price is £100 per megawatt and there is a 30-year contract life, that would be a subsidy of £1 billion a year above today’s wholesale price for electricity. That would be £30 billion to EDF from Britain’s householders and businesses—the very people we are trying to protect from high energy bills. If the whole of the 16 GW nuclear energy currently planned by the Government were financed on similar terms, that figure would be £150 billion by 2050.
Somebody asked—I cannot remember who it was; I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham —whether there had ever been any suggestion of such a large amount of money going through without scrutiny. The answer, as you will know as well as anybody, Mr Deputy Speaker, is that in this place we have often authorised huge amounts of expenditure with no debate. Indeed, when my right hon. Friend the Minister was a spokesman on Treasury matters for the Liberal Democrats he used to complain that we would spend lots of time debating taxation, but almost no time debating spend. Consolidated Fund Bills relating to billions of pounds of expenditure would go through with no debate at all. We are trying to say that we should stop and check now because we believe there is a danger of a really big subsidy being agreed under the table, as it were, in terms of parliamentary transparency, that we cannot then pull out of or unscramble.
David Mowat
We have established that this technology is more expensive than coal, but it is not more expensive than other carbon-free types of technology. In the view of the right hon. Gentleman, is the price for carbon a subsidy? He seems to be implying that it is.