Laura Sandys
Main Page: Laura Sandys (Conservative - South Thanet)
Gregory Barker
My hon. Friend is right: it is a very popular technology, and as our reformed FIT scheme is now driving down the costs and helping to promote competition, it is also scalable to a very large scale. Solar will be included properly for the first time in our renewables road map that we will publish later in the year. Solar will have a meaningful part to play in the energy future of Great Britain.
Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)
What assessment he has made of the likely level of future global oil and gas prices.
The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Charles Hendry)
DECC publishes low, central and high projections for long-term trends in world oil and gas prices. In 2011 prices, our central scenario is for oil to rise to $130 per barrel by 2030 and for gas to rise to a high of over 80p per therm in the middle of this decade, before falling back to settle at about 70p per therm.
Laura Sandys
Does the Minister see a time coming when we can decouple fossil fuel prices from low-carbon production prices?
Charles Hendry
We are already seeing some decoupling. We have seen a decoupling of the oil price from the gas price. We are expecting to see that gas will be an important source of generation in its own right, but that it will also have a very important future in providing back-up to renewable generation, which will inevitably be intermittent in most areas.