Marine Renewables Industry
Debate between Gideon Amos and Christine Jardine(2 weeks ago)
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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.
