Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Greg Knight and Rob Marris

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Rob Marris]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right that technology develops. I made a caveat at the beginning of my remarks about how I was projecting a scenario 20 or 25 years down the road, but we have a responsibility as legislators to look at that, including all the uncertainties of course.

I think it was Quentin Willson who talked about people in the States using their Tesla cars as repositories of electricity and feeding it out, but said that electricity had to get into the car in the first place, so we had to be a little careful about some sort of perpetual motion machine approach. It is true that if consumers used solar panels during the day to charge their car and dumped the electricity at night when other people were charging their cars, that would be a helpful process for evening out demand. However, it is precisely the sort of thing, I hope encouraged by amendment 15, that Her Majesty’s Government would be working on with National Grid. Trying to forecast human behaviour bedevils all of us as politicians, but it behoves us all to try to do so.

[Sir Greg Knight]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that regulation is not the only way to deal with this? It can be dealt with by incentivised pricing. In the 1970s, many households were encouraged to have night storage heaters in their properties because such units took electricity when no one else wanted it and the consumer paid less for operating one.

[Rob Marris]

I entirely agree. Amendment 15 would give the Government a statutory duty to consult on such matters with National Grid. Assuming that the amendment is accepted, the result of such consultations might indeed be a market-led mechanism. I am not prejudging the outcome, but we need to face up to some facts. I am sure that the Minister will assure us that Her Majesty’s Government are not doing this, but for them simply to sit back and say that because of CO₂ emissions and so on we want lots more people to be driving electric cars—with that already public policy, incentivised in purchase prices, with rebates and so on—and to assume that there will be sufficient electricity generation without actually talking to the National Grid about it, would be very foolish.

A regulatory solution may be required, or part of the solution may be regulatory and part not, but simply hoping, as some might do, that the market will sort it out is a triumph of hope over experience, given for example the vast cost of nuclear reactors and the very long lead time in building them. Nuclear reactors are not the only source of new electricity generation, and there will be technological developments as well, but we need to take that factor into account, and to think about it now.