Energy Bill

Julian Sturdy Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Adams (Selby and Ainsty) (Con)]

I support the Bill and applaud the momentum that has been built up towards achieving a secure and stable low-carbon electricity supply to see us through the coming decades. I also want to pay tribute to the former Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry), who spoke earlier. He contributed an immense amount to this Bill, and I know that there is immense respect for him in the industry.

In Eggborough and Drax, I have two of the country’s largest coal-fired power stations, and I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Both of those stations were built to the highest standards by the Central Electricity Generating Board and are therefore still operating effectively well beyond their planned life. Indeed, it is a measure of our country’s past engineering skills that these plants are in their fourth and fifth decade and are still playing such an important role for the country.

[Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that energy mix plays a vital role in energy security, and Drax and Eggborough contribute to that both for our region and across the country?

[Nigel Adams]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Drax, Eggborough, and Ferrybridge on our border, play an important part in making sure the lights are kept on.

Fossil fuel stations such as Eggborough can be converted from coal to sustainable biomass, which is an accepted form of renewable energy. Indeed, Drax is already being converted. That is being done in response to policy demands and is a move fully supported by DECC. It will also be helped by the Bill’s proposed transitional arrangements. Such a move will not only help ensure that the UK meets its 2020 carbon reduction targets, but will act as a vital bridge during the country’s transition to a lower carbon future, one in which I can envisage a new generation of more efficient—and, ideally, combined heat and power—plants being designed and built. They might be similar to those already in existence in Scandinavia, and they will benefit from what by then will be a more mature, sustainable global biomass supply chain.

Independent power generators such as Eggborough and Drax provide the country with flexible, dispatchable generation and, as a result of the measures in this Bill, I trust that that will continue. Such generation is essential not only to balance the intermittency and inefficiency of large-scale wind generation, which, in my view—perhaps controversially—is blighting countryside areas such as mine in Selby and Ainsty, but to keep the country’s lights on. I refer to the recent Ofgem report, which estimates that the capacity margin in UK generation will fall to 4% in 2015. That is equivalent to the full output of Eggborough or half that of Drax.

In support of such biomass conversion and to pre-empt any detractors, after much inquiry I am convinced not only that large quantities of biomass can be sourced sustainably—admittedly from overseas, like most of our present coal supply—but that by revitalising redundant plantations in, for example, the south-east USA, we will increase the carbon uptake across the forest landscape. By providing a commercial use for the vast area of beetle-killed boreal forest in Canada, an area the size of England, which is growing year on year, we can help to turn this emitter of harmful greenhouse gases into a new carbon sink through clearance and replanting.

It can be argued that by converting our coal-fired stations to burn sustainable biomass the UK would be part of a global regeneration programme for the lungs of the world. However, perhaps I had better move on from our possible global contribution to something more immediate and, for me, more local. The two coal-fired stations in my constituency currently employ thousands of people across the region. Those jobs are essential and they must be safeguarded.

I am delighted to see that Drax has commenced its initial conversion programme and am pleased to report that Eggborough is now shovel ready. Those conversion programmes are creating and will continue to create essential employment opportunities in the hard-pressed construction industry and will also provide long-term infrastructure improvements to our ports and railways, a legacy that will last long beyond the time those conversions are life-expired. I am heartened by elements of the Bill and by DECC’s stated support for full conversion programmes such as those at Eggborough and Drax, but I am aware—and so is the Minister—that some important issues about the funding of such projects remain outstanding.

We must not lose the opportunity to use our proven generation assets, which are already connected to the grid—assets that we as taxpayers originally paid for—to maintain a stable electricity supply and bridge the capacity squeeze we now so clearly face. Additionally, we must not squander the immediate potential to commence large-scale civil engineering projects in the UK. The combined value of the Eggborough and Drax projects is more than £1 billion and such investments will secure thousands of existing jobs and create many more in Selby and Ainsty and across the north.