Marine Renewables Industry

Gideon Amos Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine, and to welcome you to your place. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) on securing what we all surely agree is a really important debate.

Many people do not support renewables. I guess they are not here today but we occasionally hear them in the Chamber, saying things like, “What are you going to do when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine?” We see the answer when we look out to the sea: the tide rises and falls twice a day, every day, 365 days a year, so we can build a future on renewable energy. We must do that if we are to achieve net zero and protect our planet.

The Celtic sea has massive opportunities. I am going to discuss something that Members may not have expected: the maritime importance of Taunton, which is in the middle of Somerset. Taunton is the headquarters of the UK Hydrographic Office, which produces the Admiralty charts—famed throughout the world for being the biggest mapping system of the ocean floor around the world. It is the world leader and its charts are used by navies and merchant navies around the world. No one is quite sure why the office came to Taunton in Somerset, although it may be because it is not that near the coast; one story is that enemy bombers would therefore find it harder to find. We are very proud of that link, and of course we are only a few miles from the coasts to the north and to the south.

As the county town of Somerset, we are an important regional centre. Under the previous Labour Government, we hosted the regional assembly in Taunton and the Government office for the south-west was in Taunton because we have an equidistant position in the greater south-west region. Our transport links are excellent—it takes 99 minutes to get to Paddington in the heart of London or 30 minutes in either direction to get to the heart of Bristol or of Exeter. All those reasons make it the ideal location for the south-west office of Great British Energy; I am almost certain that the Minister will announce that in his summing up. Seriously, it is an excellent location for regional centres.

Taunton would be an ideal place to host many of the headquarters of the companies involved in the offshore industry. In the Celtic sea, we have the welcome 4.5 GW of offshore wind that has been announced. Sometimes people underestimate the scale of that; I always translate it into four and a half nuclear power stations being built in the Celtic sea—hopefully it will not take the 20 or 30 years that Hinkley seems to be taking. Generating that clean energy is vital.

As well as offshore wind, I want to put in a word for tidal stream, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland and the hon. Members for Truro and Falmouth (Jayne Kirkham) and for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon) have talked about eloquently. Tidal stream is vital—we need energy from all these sources—but tidal range is as well: it generates, project for project, hundreds of times more electricity, as shown in northern France with La Rance in Saint-Malo. That was built by de Gaulle and is still generating around 60 MW of energy.

When I was working for the Government inspectorate, I was privileged to be the lead inspector on the Swansea tidal lagoon, which got its consent. In my view, it was a massive mistake of the previous Conservative Government not to fund that project; we could have had a new generation of tidal energy from this country. We have the second highest tidal range in the world—up and down by 9 metres at the maximum, which is second only to western Canada, where there is a thriving tidal range energy industry. We should be building on that for the future.

Tidal range, tidal stream and offshore wind bring big opportunities to the south-west of England. Although I recognise that Members from Cornwall may be at the sharper end of the Celtic sea than us in Taunton, there are important benefits for the whole south-west in terms of upskilling, investment in skills training and the construction industry. The Great South West regional development agency has identified energy as a key driver of the south-west economy. Government support for skills, training and research projects could be absolutely crucial to the economy of the whole south-west, and particularly my part of Somerset, with University Centre Somerset and the UK Hydrographic Office working together in my constituency. There could be some really exciting projects, looking at Horizon funding as well as skills investment. I hope the Government will support those kinds of projects and applications.

As well as getting support for skills, training and research, we need to bring the community with us. That means we need to give a lot more thought and attention to the compensation and the community support from these projects. We need reliable levels of community benefit from each project. There have been some advances on that from solar projects onshore, although my constituents in Ham would like to see more community benefit for the solar farm there.

It is less developed with wind, and we need a reliable system in which communities that will be affected by offshore wind, because of the massive onshore infrastructure, know that they will benefit in some way from that project. The industry needs to be held to account so that it clearly meets established standards of community benefits. I hope that the Minister will say something about that in his summing up.

We also need more sensible approaches to mitigation for the natural environment. Surely we cannot go on any longer with a system in which every offshore wind project comes up against a debate about whether it will kill 0.5 birds or 0.9 birds in the course of 20 years, and then people design an elaborate mitigation system for that one project. We know that we will be building offshore wind projects. We need to build them. We know what the impacts will be on wild birds and other natural species. Therefore, we need to put in the compensatory measures in advance in a strategic way. I know that the Crown Estate is beginning to look at strategic compensation, but it is far too late. We need to get on with this now. We know the impacts. We know that it is one of the biggest factors slowing down our offshore wind projects. We can look at the experience in Denmark. The Danes are building islands to support their offshore wind industry before it starts, so they know the compensation will be there.

I would like to support the points that have been made on the need for a taskforce, which would certainly be important and should encompass skills, training and research in the whole offshore energy sector, and I urge the Government to recognise the regional powerhouse that the south-west can be and is in renewable energy. We have six energy NSIP DCOs—development consent orders for nationally significant infrastructure projects —across Devon, Somerset and Wiltshire, for example. It is a vital part of the UK economy, and Taunton lies right at the heart of it.

[Christine Jardine (in the Chair)]

I call Liz Saville Roberts.

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[Brian Mathew (Melksham and Devizes) (LD)]

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) and everyone who has spoken so far in the debate.

Back in 2009 I was involved in an as yet conceptual tidal project known as the reef. It was projected to stretch from Aberthaw in south Wales to Minehead in Somerset, a distance of some 17 km. It was designed by Rupert Armstrong Evans at the behest of the University of Southampton, which asked Mr Evans to design a scheme that would be environmentally benign and would generate significant energy for the UK.

You will no doubt be aware, Ms Jardine, that the tidal difference in the Bristol channel is the second largest in the world. The idea of a tidal barrage in the Bristol channel is not new, and the location of the reef on the Aberthaw to Minehead line was first suggested in the 1930s as being the best place to generate electricity and energy from the tides in the Bristol channel.

In 2010, when the current Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero was Secretary of State for the then Department of Energy and Climate Change, he announced funding for investigations of embryonic tidal technologies. Rolls-Royce and Atkins won the contract to do the study, and their work showed that a tidal scheme on the Aberthaw to Minehead route would generate per year 30.4 TW hours of electricity, significantly more than the Cardiff to Weston-super-Mare line, which was in the region of 20 TW hours per annum.

The Aberthaw to Minehead line has the added advantage that it has no mud—unlike Weston-super-Mare, as anyone who has visited Weston in the summer will know. Its seabed is rock all the way across and so has greater possibilities for locking tidal caissons holding large turbines to the sea floor. The design of the reef would allow for a maximum of 2 metres head on both the incoming and outgoing tides, which would mean that fish could safely swim through the large turbines without getting hurt. That is a big factor, and one reason for the rejection of previous tidal schemes in in the Bristol channel.

Other factors to consider are, first, that 30.4 TWh per annum is larger than the expected annual output of Hinkley Point C, which is 30.2 TWh. Secondly, a degree of energy storage from the reef would be possible.

[Gideon Amos]

I thank my hon. Friend for making an excellent point about the centrality of Somerset—in particular, the Minehead route just north of Taunton—to renewable energy. Does he accept that tidal range and tidal barrages and lagoons could make a significant contribution? As he pointed out so well, Swansea lagoon would have done up to 30 TWh, but we could do that across the UK. There could be tidal lagoons in Morecambe bay and in Cumbria, where one was proposed. That would bring investment to regions across the UK and not just benefit the south-west and Somerset.

[Brian Mathew]

I thank my hon. Friend for his points, which of course are true. This technology could be employed right across the United Kingdom and its amazing coastline.

A third advantage would be that ships could pass up and down the Bristol channel via large floating lock gates. Fourthly, the project could be upgraded over its life so that it would effectively be time-unlimited, even with sea level rises. A fifth point, which could well be applied to renewable schemes across the UK, is that the excess energy—or the energy that the grid cannot use at any particular time—could be diverted into the manufacture of synthetic fuels. That would be one way of dealing with the problem of what to do when we generate energy and there is no call for it. In short, this project is well worth further investigation.

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[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

It is a genuine pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Ms Jardine. Congratulations on your appointment to the Panel of Chairs, and I am sure that this is the first of many long sessions in the Chair in Westminster Hall.

Today’s debate on marine renewables has been fascinating, and I congratulate the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) on securing it. Before I go any further, I will echo his comments on EMEC, the incredibly important role it has played and Neil Kermode’s leadership over the past few years. It has delivered a world-leading technology and, indeed, makes for an inspirational visit, if anybody has the time or inclination to go north to the Orkney Islands.

It has, for the most part, been a thoroughly pleasant afternoon listening to an oral tour of some of our great coastal communities—and of Taunton and Melksham and Devizes. I have nothing against Taunton; it is just that it stood out for me. I have personal links with many of those communities, so it was a genuine pleasure to listen to the debate.

As so many people have said, the United Kingdom is uniquely placed in terms of marine energy. We are an island nation, and our history has been written by the seas. Given the potential of marine energy to help drive us towards our clean energy future, our future will be written by them too.

Energy from the sea is not a new concept in the United Kingdom, especially not to somebody who hails from Aberdeen. The UK continental shelf and the Norwegian continental shelf have been the lifeblood of the UK’s energy industry since the 1970s. Aberdeen, in the north-east of Scotland, has been the powerhouse of the European energy sector for decades. My sincere hope is that that remains so in the decades ahead.

[Mr Clive Betts in the Chair]

As the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland has shown this afternoon, the east coast of Scotland, and particularly his constituency, is well designed for marine energy technologies, and particularly tidal. Marine energy generation in the UK covers many technologies, some of which—such as tidal and wave generation—are not yet deployed at scale and not quite at a commercial level. That also includes offshore wind, which has successfully scaled up in the United Kingdom over the past few years.

I did not want to get drawn into yet another list—I know how much the Minister enjoys my reeling off the previous Conservative Government’s successes when it comes to investment in renewable technologies—but I was prompted into it by the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Claire Young). I am very proud that we built the first to the fifth largest offshore wind farms in the world, which are delivering power into the United Kingdom right now, that we halved our emissions and that we were the fastest cutter of emissions of any country in the G7. We are very proud of what we did, which is supporting thousands of new jobs across the United Kingdom, particularly in the north-east of England, in communities such as Grimsby and around the Humber.

The UK’s seas are home to the emerging technologies we have heard about this afternoon. Many of the technologies we will employ in the energy transition might not be fully fledged, but the previous Government were proud to announce a record £650 million of investment—for example, into the development of nuclear fusion technology, in which the UK is a world leader. We support the development of fusion and the development of technologies such as tidal, because, moving forward, we need to support all energy solutions.

As I said, the previous Government did a great deal to provide an economic framework for various technologies—especially marine energy projects—and to try to attract private sector investment through the contracts for difference scheme. In 2021, we announced that £30 million per year would be ringfenced for tidal stream projects. Allocation round 4 in 2022 made allocations to four tidal stream projects, which was a first. Allocation round 5 in 2023 is often castigated as a failed round, so obsessed are some people with wind at the expense of everything else, but it made allocations to 11 tidal projects, with capacity totalling over 50 MW. Allocation round 6, which was run under the previous Government and announced by the current Government, made allocations to six tidal stream projects, with a total capacity of 28 MW.

With the CfD mechanism, the previous Government created the conditions for new technologies such as tidal to thrive. As the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland set out at the beginning of the debate, the world’s most powerful tidal turbine was launched off the east coast of Scotland by Orbital Marine Power, an Orkney-based company. Constructed in Dundee, the 2 MW turbine capitalises on some of the strongest currents in the world. In 2024, thanks to the dogged and determined campaigning by Neil, the right hon. Gentleman and others, the then Secretary of State for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities—now the editor of The Spectator—and I secured £3 million of new funding for EMEC, recognising the work that it does. That was in addition to having invested over £7 million between 2016 and 2022.

The question posed by many is, why bother with marine energy when we have so many other technologies we are investing in right now? We have offshore, onshore, nuclear technologies that are coming on stream, solar power and everything else. Well, it is because we must. We need to invest in all the technologies available to us in order to drive us forward into our clean energy future, to make us more energy independent and energy secure.

Sadly, there was no mention of tidal in the “Clean Power 2030” document published by the Government. There is a perception—it might not be the reality—that tidal technology has fallen through the gap. In the rush to decarbonise the energy system, the Secretary of State seems to be putting all the eggs into two baskets. It would be good if the Minister could set out that that was not the case and that the Government were as committed to tidal and wave power as they should be. When the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine, wind and solar will not keep the lights on in the United Kingdom.

[Gideon Amos]

The hon. Gentleman is criticising the lack of action on tidal, so can he explain why his Government cancelled the Swansea tidal lagoon?

[Andrew Bowie]

The previous Government looked at the Swansea tidal lagoon in great detail and depth, but the decision was taken before my time in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero not to proceed with it. I am informed that it was due to a combination of the cost and the reluctance of those involved to make the case that the technology would be successful. However, if it can be presented as a viable project—if the costs can be brought down and the technology can be proved to work—of course the current Government could look at it again. We should be investing in things that work and that return a benefit to the taxpayer.

Last week, the UK learned the word “Dunkelflaute”—I have probably pronounced it terribly—which expresses what happens when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. The recent cold snap illustrated just how insecure a system reliant on intermittent renewables such as solar and wind will be, so we need to invest in new baseload generation, including gas, nuclear and tidal.

Those technologies sadly got little mention in the Secretary of State’s “Clean Power 2030” action plan. There were few words about nuclear and nothing about tidal—seemingly, no plan for future generation. It is clear that a wide mix of energies will be required to ensure our energy independence and security. Offshore wind and solar are obviously essential parts of the mix, but so too will be—or at least should be—oil and gas; nuclear, large and small, with microreactors; and new and emerging technologies such as wave and tidal. The developments happening across all those technologies in this country are great.

We should support Great British and Northern Irish scientists, innovators, engineers and technicians who have the opportunity to build on the successes of the past decade, which saw Great Britain and Northern Ireland lead the world in investing in new energy generation. To echo the sentiment of other right hon. and hon. Members, we need more direction and clarity from the Government about where we are heading on this journey to more tidal and wave investment. We fully support the calls for a road map and a taskforce to drive that forward and support the industry.

I say to the Government: please do not just put all our eggs in two baskets, but invest in and support other technologies. We need all those energy sources in future. Many of the technologies will be developed and deployed around the coast, in some of the more deprived communities in this country, so the jobs and investment that they will contribute will be massively beneficial not just for our energy security but for the wider economy. If we invest now—if we spend the time and money and expend the energy—Great Britain and Northern Ireland can yet again be the beating heart of this new global industrial revolution.

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[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

On a point of order, Mr Betts. I place on record that although, since the general election, I do not work in renewables, I still own shares in a company that does.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

That is not, strictly speaking, a point of order for the Chair, but it is relevant to the debate, so I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising it and putting it on the record.