Energy Bill [Lords]

Greg Smith Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 9th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

I welcome many of measures contained in the Bill, not least the clear step forward in embracing nuclear. Indeed, I consider it an act of national vandalism and a huge part of our difficulties on energy cost and supply since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that previous Governments failed so badly on nuclear.

First, I wish to focus my remarks on community energy. It is an absurdity that the community energy sector has seen minimal growth in recent years, accounting for less than 0.5% of total UK electricity generation capacity, not because of the cost of technological development or even deployment, but because of energy market and licensing rules. That should be easily fixable, so I add my voice of support for clauses 272 and 273 to enable community schemes to sell the electricity they generate locally.

These seem to be straightforward, pro-competition, pro-consumer reforms, and my central ask is that they should be adopted as part of the Bill. If my hon. Friend the Minister is minded not to support them, what will he propose to open up the huge community energy sector opportunity that the Environmental Audit Committee’s 2021 report identified could grow by 12 to 20 times by 2030, powering 2.2 million homes?

I turn to the challenges facing rural off-grid households. According to the latest census, 15% of my constituents—and, for transparency, this applies to my house too—use oil-fired boilers for central heating, compared with 3% nationally, and a further 4% use tanked or bottled gas, compared with 1% nationally. As it stands, such households are looking down the barrels of massive expenditure when their boilers need replacing. A troubling direction of travel means that, as soon as 2026, these oil-burning boilers will be banned and groupthink will be directing us to worship at the altar of the heat pump.

Not only are these things horrendously expensive, but for many rural homes they just will not, and never will, work. The Government’s own data shows that some 20% of off-grid households simply cannot use them. Many rural or older homes, built out of stone, cob or “Whychert”, which is unique to the Vale of Aylesbury, are less energy efficient, more expensive, more difficult and, in some cases, impossible to insulate. It is essential that the Government drop ambitions to ban people from using systems that actually work for their homes. Instead, they should ensure there is the best variety of choices available to households to choose how to decarbonise in a way that will not leave them broke, indebted and cold.

The best way of moving forward would be to adopt the provisions in the Renewable Liquid Heating Fuel Bill, introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), into this Bill. That would enable people to transfer to the use of hydrotreated vegetable oil at a fraction of the cost of a heat pump and associated works—we are talking hundreds of pounds to convert, rather than tens of thousands of pounds for the alternative.

That leads me to a wider ask on the future of fuel. It is hugely welcome that, with this Bill, the Government are seeking to recognise recycled carbon fuels in legislation by extending the eligible fuel types under the renewable transport fuel obligation orders to include two new low-carbon fuels. As it is inconceivable that the future of aviation and maritime will ever be without the need for a liquid hydrocarbon, the challenge is what that liquid hydrocarbon looks like. My central argument is that, by using drop-in biofuels, which are more easily and financially scalable, in the short term and fully synthetic fuels in the medium to long term, the choice extended to aviation and maritime can equally be enjoyed, with much wider access, across other heavy-duty applications, such as agriculture and construction machinery, road haulage, rail, motorsport and, linking back to my second theme, the very fuel we use to heat rural and off-grid homes in a manner that does not leave people poorer and colder.

This is about developing new fuels for what we already have, not spending billions of pounds on reinventing the wheel, or at least that which makes the wheels and propellers turn. Perhaps such fuels will even be the saviour of the road car as we know it, as even the European Commission is proposing to allow e-fuels in combustion engines after its zero emission cut-off date in 2035.

Petrosynthesis, as Paddy Lowe, the pioneer of one synthetic manufacturer, Zero, calls it, creates a balanced, circular and sustainable future of indefinite timescale—the industrial version of the natural carbon cycle. This Energy Bill should be the vehicle to embrace this evolution right here in the United Kingdom. Across transport and domestic energy, synthetics offer so much. We just need to get fully behind them.