Energy: Security

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I wonder if I could speak in the gap, since the debate is rattling on quite quickly. I have two points. First, having lived in a world some time ago when we were not worried about terrorism or problems like that—and I now live in an IT world—how on earth one secures the transmission of the gas or whatever it might be through potentially hostile territories, particularly in an internet world where these things are controlled electronically, is extremely difficult. Since one has no power, particularly to enforce certain security levels in other countries that might be travelled through, there are huge vulnerabilities. I feel very sorry for the people who try to do this. I know that we have some very good people working on it, and I just hope that they manage to keep us secure, because we are highly vulnerable with the route from some of the supply fields all the way to the UK. At the end of the day, we are at the end of the line.

Secondly, I want to put in a plug for something. This morning, I was speaking at the Institution of Engineering and Technology on the internet of things, and one of the interesting things that came out of this with machine-to-machine communication was the concept of the virtual power station. I ought to declare an interest as chairman of HyperCat. That is short for Hyper-Catalogue, which it is about machines communicating interoperability on the internet of things. This might sound off the point, but if we can start to look at the energy requirements and start to move it around a little, we can save ourselves the need to fire up a power station at certain moments. I throw that in because we were talking about alternative supplies, whereas this is far more important: the high-level stuff and the negotiation of treaties.

At the practical end, where I live a lot of the time—I am not expecting any answer to this at all because it is left of field for this particular debate—there are technologies out there and new things coming along. The Government should look at some of the funding for what we call the internet of things, which, at the moment—although it sounds techie—is climbing up the degree of importance. It could really help in areas such as this when talking about alternative supplies: not because of the supplies, but because of the savings that can be made. Therefore, I make a quick plug for new technology and perhaps government funding in the next spending round. That area is doing quite well thus far; it could do better.