Dieter Helm Energy Review

Debate between Graham Stringer and James Heappey

Tuesday 24th April 2018 Westminster Hall

[James Heappey (Wells) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. I congratulate the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) on securing the debate.

I agree with much of what has been said. The Helm report is imperfect, although my copy is greatly improved by the artwork on the back of it contributed by my children. Such a report was always going to be imperfect. For the past 18 months, since the report was first discussed and commissioned, the whole industry and the Government have been holding their breath in anticipation of the response. It was always unlikely that the clouds would part and Professor Helm—as brilliant as he is—would provide the absolute solution for all future energy policy.

Professor Helm is right that the auction system we have been operating over the past decade or so is imperfect. It is complicated, and parts of it have given us the wrong result. Until recently, in the grid services markets, in particular, we ended up with lots of diesel coming through to meet that need. Clearly, that is not what the Government or anybody in the lobby in favour of decarbonisation hoped for. Clearly, it was not perfect. I accept Professor Helm’s criticism of the Government’s picking winners. More accurately, losers are very good at picking Governments. There is no doubt that some things we committed to in the past would not bear scrutiny today.

I do not accept that it is all doom and gloom. I accept the criticism from the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton of the advertising that suggested that the cost of offshore wind had come down by 50%, but let that not hide the fact that the speed at which the cost of offshore wind has come down is a stunning success. Whatever the reduction is—we can debate that—there is no doubt that, only a few years ago, it was well over £100 per megawatt-hour, and it is now well below that. That is a consequence of the Government seeing the opportunity both from an energy perspective and for industrial strategy in the north-east of England. I think that is a good thing.

[Graham Stringer]

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s point, but does he agree that there has not been a huge technological advance in windmill technology over the past few years? The drop in costs probably represents how inefficient the energy market was previously, rather than an increase in wind turbines’ efficiency.

[James Heappey]

I do not have the evidence at hand to disagree with the hon. Gentleman absolutely, but my understanding from the industry—I accept that he is sceptical about the industry’s lobbying prowess—is that there have been some fairly significant improvements in the cost of manufacture and in the scale of the wind turbines that can be deployed. It may be that the cogs, wires and mechanisms within are no more efficient than they were—I honestly do not know—but if they can now be deployed much more cheaply because of the scale at which they are being manufactured, and if they can generate so much more electricity because of the size of these things, I think that those are cost reductions even if the underlying technology has not moved on. I suspect it has a little, but I do not have the evidence at hand to debate that point today.

Renewables have, I think, become the cheapest form of generation. Solar has been going gangbusters in the speed at which it has brought down its costs and so, too, has onshore wind, notwithstanding the political pressures against it in this place. It is increasingly hard to argue that the burning of hydrocarbon for the purpose of generating electricity is the cheapest way of providing electricity. More and more often, we can buy out the intermittency of renewables to deliver very cheap clean green energy, and it is no longer a choice between decarbonisation and cheap energy. It is just that the greener energy happens to be the cheapest as well. Crucially, what renewables also allow us to do, which will realise a big saving, is to decentralise the energy system. That will certainly bring with it significant reductions in the costs of transmission, and potentially even distribution as well.

I have said that our auction mechanism is imperfect, but it is worth noting that many other countries have sought to emulate what we have done with Government policy on the deployment of renewables. It has sped up our decarbonisation—spectacularly so—and has reduced the wholesale price of energy. I accept that that has been clouded by a combination of the energy companies not necessarily passing on the savings to consumers as quickly as they could and of the green taxes that the Government put on top of the wholesale price. That has meant that consumers do not see it, as some people in this room would, as the right thing, because, as the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton said, they have not seen on their bill the translation of that change into their energy costs.

Professor Helm also rightly mentioned that there are other areas for decarbonisation where the Government have not yet made as much progress as they might. Some very good things are being talked about within the Minister’s Department and I know that she is a big champion of the decarbonisation of heat and how we do that better. I am a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Department for Transport and I know that a lot of work is going on there to look at how we decarbonise transport and the future of mobility.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is doing great things on waste. I accept the criticism of Professor Helm and others in this place that agriculture has been lagging behind. Representing a farming constituency, I know exactly why that is the case. It will be very challenging when we have to start telling people that they need to reduce their consumption of meat, milk, cheese and everything else in the interest of decarbonisation, but that conversation is surely coming.

The issue is how we translate all the advances in technology in the power sector into reduced bills. The Domestic Gas and Electricity (Tariff Cap) Bill, which I spoke to on Second Reading—I also served on the Public Bill Committee—should not be regarded as the process by which we do that. I am reassured by my previous discussion with my right hon. Friend the Minister, and I hope that the Bill will not be a temporary raid on the market.

The analogy that I like to use is that the current market, the caterpillar, is going into the chrysalis and on the other side we will have the butterfly that is the wonderful, digitised, decentralised energy system of the future. It would be disastrous if the caterpillar went into the chrysalis and after an inordinate period of time what emerged on the other side was still a caterpillar. We need to give Ofgem the latitude to use this as an opportunity not just to introduce a price cap, but to transform the energy system so that all of the savings that clean tech undoubtedly will afford start to translate into reduced bills for consumers.

In this place, we have a job to keep ahead of what will undoubtedly be a change in the mindset of consumers. Electric vehicles are not gaining in popularity among the electorate because we in Parliament have told people they are a good thing. They are gaining in popularity because they are unquestionably the future of motoring. They are technologically advanced, better than normal cars and cheaper to run, and people will be going for such things as a result of that, not because they are motivated by decarbonisation. We need an energy system that is ready to give them not only the ability to motor effortlessly because the charging network is all there, but from which, with their electric vehicles, they can take full advantage of the fact that they now have a battery parked outside their home and can participate in the energy system to further reduce their bills.

Increasingly, people will start to get the internet of things within their home and businesses. They might not realise that that transition is happening because all that it might mean at the moment is a smart speaker in the corner of the room from which they invite Alexa to tell them the weather. Increasingly, people will find that as their homes become smart, they will be able to participate in the energy system and access services that will allow them to deliver their domestic energy much more cheaply because something like Alexa, Siri, Google Home or whoever else will be able to run their homes more cheaply and will work out when they need to perform various functions to take advantage of cheaper market prices.

In turn, as policy makers we need to ensure that everything is in place for storage to be fully unlocked both in catalysing the research and development for grid scale storage and making sure that the market is ready for people who have storage in their business, home or community. We need to make sure that the market is ready for storage to participate.

Demand-side response has been spoken about for so long, but I am not sure we have the policy levers quite right yet to make sure that demand responds on a meaningful scale, particularly when aggregated across lots of domestic users and small businesses. We have the big users signed up to it, but delivering it when it is aggregated across a large number of consumers is very important. We need to accelerate that transmission because I suspect that consumer demand for those things will start to take off quite quickly in the next five to 10 years. There is a danger that we will get caught out having not put in place policy and regulatory frameworks for the new energy system that people will realise they want, and it will not be delivered if we do not get that right.

The other thing it is tempting to do when talking about Professor Helm’s report, which focuses on the big stuff, is to forget that energy efficiency is far and away the best way to deliver savings to consumers. I know the Government have made some eye-catching announcements on this recently, and it is absolutely right that we continue to see small gains in people’s homes and businesses as just as important as the things that we talk about in the North sea or the big power stations that we build here in this country. They will deliver the biggest savings by far for consumers in the short and medium term.

I will wrap up simply by saying that the report is not perfect—we know that—but it raises interesting points that have stimulated a conversation in Parliament and helped to focus the Government on what could change. We are in danger of losing the argument with the bill payer if we do not start to show how all the clean technologies can and will translate into lower bills for users. The longer-term challenge is how we make sure that we fully decentralise and digitise the energy system. With that comes an opportunity to balance upwards from behind the meter through the community and then the region, rather than having the current system that is run rather inefficiently by a centralised system operator.

Last week BP announced some eye-catching policies for their internal decarbonisation goals over the next 10 to 15 years, but what was interesting was to hear Bob Dudley. When asked about the role BP might play in helping its customers decarbonise, he was clear that getting carbon pricing right is the thing that will move the dial most obviously, particularly for the big industrial users of energy. As policy makers we need to start considering urgently how we strike that balance between prompting the right behaviour from industry and not being punitive when it comes to increasing the price of energy. The opportunity for a future hydrogen economy requires decades of planning as we seek to transition, so starting that conversation now is very important indeed.

The discussion that we are having today is excellent. There is a lot that the Government need to do, and that Professor Helm will have prompted them to do through his report. It is not perfect, but the fact is that renewables are driving down the costs of energy. We need to be able to translate that into cheaper bills for the consumer. I know that the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton is sceptical on such matters, but I passionately believe that the evidence shows that what we are doing is the right thing, and that we should keep our course.