Bioeconomy: S&T Committee Report

Lord Dixon-Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Dixon-Smith (Con)]

My Lords, I acknowledge the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and his time as chairman of the Science and Technology Committee. I had the privilege of being with him for some of that period. I had the privilege of serving on that committee back in the 1990s, which seems an awfully long time ago. To me, the great joy of being there is the amount that I am exposed to and learn. I suspect that most other Members find that to be the case; however good and clever we are, the specialist examinations that we undertake, of which this is one, are always superb. I thoroughly enjoyed this report. I also enjoyed the Government’s response and I hope that my noble friend, in her reply, will assure us that we are going to get the Government’s road map on time in the new year. At this time in politics, when one is approaching an election, administrative flaws seem occasionally to develop in the system, which hold up the essential business of managing the affairs of the country because the politics of the country, for some reason, takes an improper priority.

I am also somewhat prompted to intervene because I have a nephew who is involved with a company in this business. As I understand it, the company has eliminated completely the word “waste” from all its paperwork. I have to say that I have not tested him on the title of our report with that word eliminated, but it is in fact an important psychological point. Most waste is not waste, except for a point I am going to make where in fact that is what it is.

I should talk for a moment about the way this business has evolved. I was involved in Essex for a long time. At one stage we had one of the most notorious hazardous waste dumps in the country. It was a huge problem for everyone, including the firms which had to export their hazardous waste all the way across the country to dispose of it because we were one of the very few places that could take it. It was a wonderfully managed scientific site, but—this is the key point—the owners came increasingly to the realisation that they were dealing with materials that someone else wanted. The site is virtually non-existent today, except of course that there is a still a big mound which is full of hazardous materials. However, it is only a matter of time before they will be mined. I merely want to make the point.

We also used to receive in Essex a great deal of London’s waste, and indeed we probably still do. The less of it we receive the better, as far as Essex is concerned. However, it was an important source of land reclamation material when we had to deal with the scars of what I choose to call industrial extraction from the land. That was a pretty brutal process and left the land deeply scarred, and the material was useful for that. However, we were running out of holes; it was as simple as that.

The development of the organic wastes business—I have to use the word—into the transfer of a resource is a process which began a long time ago in other fields, and it is very good to see it coming here. However, the waste I want to talk about, and which we have not dealt with, is waste heat, particularly the waste heat from power stations. I hope that I will be forgiven for raising the issue but this is an opportunity to do so. I should say that I do not expect my noble friend the Minister to reply, but merely to take note of my comments. We have not discussed this aspect very much. Perhaps I should begin by saying that it is not an easy matter. In south-east London, somewhere down Deptford way, is an organisation that was established around 20 years known as South East London Combined Heat and Power, which I think is now called simply South East London Power. The idea was to establish an incinerator in the middle of a built-up area. It was constructed to a very high standard so that it would produce no pollution, and there have never been any complaints about it in that respect. It was to generate electricity and to provide heat for the surrounding community. The problem with waste heat is what to do with it. It should be possible to heat huge areas. But there has been no agreement about who should do the plumbing, which is why the company is known today just as South East London Power. Noble Lords might think that that is such a basic little thing, but of course it has to be paid for. It was a complete failure.

I am now going to misinterpret a law of physics that I learnt in school, which is something like: heat lost equals heat gained. I suspect that when we talk about power stations it is a fact that energy lost is energy gained. If we are looking ahead to solving the problems of the energy economy into the middle of this century—we have the Climate Change Act, which sets out the necessary targets for carbon emission—we cannot afford to lose all the heat produced.

Some of us unquestionably enjoy the wonderful tomatoes which come from a bank of greenhouses close to one power station, but we cannot take all the heat from our power stations like that. I live in Chelsea. We had there what used to be one of the most efficient power stations in the country—Battersea—which heated nearly all of Battersea and a large chunk of Chelsea. It has completely gone and is now a building site; fair enough, it is better that than it does nothing. Perhaps we should have put two nuclear reactors in there and heated half of London, I do not know, but, when you look at their safety record there is no reason why that should not have happened.

The difficulty is that we are producing this huge resource in remote landscapes where we cannot use it. Many industries are very effective in their use of recovered heat, but the power generation industry cannot do it because there is no demand for such heat where they are located.

The reasons I am raising this issue today are deep and difficult. Rationally, if we were to solve this problem—and I think, in 2015, we need to solve it—we would put our power stations much closer to residential areas, where the heat could be piped in and used for district heating. Denmark and other European countries are much better at this than we are and there is a significant lesson to be learnt. I apologise for introducing what could almost be called a red herring, but I thought it sufficiently important to have on record that this is a problem that has got to be tackled at some point in the future.