Electricity: Cost-competitiveness Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Energy Security & Net Zero
Lord Hain
Main Page: Lord Hain (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Hain's debates with the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero
(7 months ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, I am happy to acknowledge the noble Baroness’s point, but, if she is attempting to say that other forms of generation—gas-fired power plants, nuclear power plants or whatever—do not have many of those materials, she would be wrong.
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister mentioned China. Why are some of the offshore wind farm components, especially the huge structures and blades, being manufactured in China rather than in Britain?
Lord Callanan (Con)
The noble Lord makes an important point. Actually, relatively few components are manufactured in China, although some are. Many of them are manufactured in other parts of Europe, and increasingly many are manufactured in the UK. If the noble Lord had been in the Grand Committee earlier this week, he would have heard us debate a new regulation designed precisely to overcome that problem. This is to make sure that there are extra payments to some of the developers to make sure that we locate more of the supply chains in the UK, because we want to see the benefits spread throughout the country, particularly Wales and northern parts of the UK, which already have many of these supply chain companies. We need to become increasingly successful at that. The rest of the world is proceeding to copy us and develop offshore wind, so there are massive export opportunities if we can locate those supply chains in the UK.