Queen’s Speech

Lord Birt Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I do not for one moment underestimate the herculean difficulty of planning to achieve net zero by the due date. The core difficulty is that many of the technologies that we will need are embryonic and their economics are uncertain. I was educated in the sciences, and I do not doubt for one moment that brilliant and ingenious scientists will one day come to the world’s rescue, as they have done so magnificently with the Covid vaccines—but we cannot simply sit by and wait for those inevitable breakthroughs to occur.

We know that we will need greatly to increase our electricity generation, and by non-carbon means, and that we will have to decarbonise transport and the heating of our homes and buildings. It is common ground that wind, solar and nuclear should be the prime sources in the future of electricity generation. But renewables, as we all know, are intermittent, so it is less clear how we will cope with the massive daily and seasonal variations in demand.

Battery technology for storage to meet peak demand is slow to progress. The economics of using renewable and nuclear power off-peak to create clean hydrogen as an energy source are not yet settled, as the clinical BEIS analysis earlier this year identified. Carbon capture and storage is another technology still in its infancy, and its economics are also unclear, so decarbonising the use of hydrocarbons to cope with peak electricity demand is yet another uncertainty.

The electrification of most road vehicles offers the easiest path forward to decarbonisation. The Government have willed the ends but not, so far, the means. I own an EV and can testify vividly that the UK’s current charging infrastructure is unreliable and chaotic. Let me give one tiny example. In the first days of installing our home charge point, the local DNO delivered electricity outside the statutory range and disabled our charger. It was extremely challenging to diagnose and remedy the fault. Where is the Government’s framework for ensuring that every kind of home, whether in a tower block, a terraced street, suburbia or a country village, has access to a charge point which is as easy and convenient as filling your tank with petrol?

As for rail transport, we will not be able to afford to electrify all our railway lines. Will biofuels or hydrogen power our trains on these non-electrified lines?

Home heating is a most challenging issue. Air and ground pump technology is far more energy efficient than resistive electric heating, but at the moment it produces a low ambient temperature and is ineffective without 360-degree insulation of floors, walls, windows and ceilings. We have the oldest housing stock in Europe; insulating it will be a massive and extremely expensive task. Where is our long-term approach to that? We have invested vastly in our gas grid. We could replace natural gas with hydrogen, but again, the cost currently looks prohibitive.

As I said, I really do sympathise with the scale and complexity of the challenge the Government face in identifying the optimum economic path through these uncertainties, with many Whitehall departments involved, not least transport, housing, local government, BEIS and the Treasury. In his closing remarks—or, if that is not possible, in a letter—could the Minister please explain how the Cabinet Office is herding the cats, and creating and co-ordinating a coherent path to pick a reliable way to our net-zero target?