Contracts for Difference (Electricity Supplier Obligations) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister for the clarity and thoroughness of his introduction to these regulations. I also sincerely thank all those key workers in energy and power production, not least everyone at National Grid, who have kept the lights and the heat on through this Covid crisis, often putting themselves in harm’s way to ensure that everybody across the country has power.

I welcome the regs in the sense that they are necessary, given the current construction of the sector, but as other noble Lords have commented, there is an extraordinarily high level of complexity and opacity in the whole energy sector. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that it would be helpful to produce a clear chart showing the real price per kilowatt hour of energy, including everything, from whatever source that energy came?

I appreciate that this is somewhat off-piste, but perhaps my noble friend will indulge me: in this new future that we are embarking upon, does Hinkley C in any sense seem like something we should be doing? A technology unproven and unbuilt, a deal done at a strike price three times the strike price at the time—it was a bad deal then and it looks disastrous now. If he were offered that today, would he say “deal” or “no deal”?

Finally, what are the Government doing to address one of the most pernicious energy issues? Those on meters or pre-paid cards—those in our society who have the least—often find themselves paying the most. Does he agree with me that we still need to do so much to address this inequity?