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Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Indeed, my noble friend makes a very good point about the extent to which electricity usage will grow. Actually, the peak electricity usage in the UK occurred a number of years ago. We have actually been becoming more efficient in how we use electricity, with better lighting, et cetera. Clearly, if we move to more electric vehicles and more electrically powered heating, along with some of the circumstances that my noble friend outlines, electrical use will go up. We are spending many tens of billions of pounds on upgrading the electrical grid and rolling out increasing amounts of renewable: offshore wind, tidal, solar and so on. But in essence my noble friend is right that we need to plan for an electrical future.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, following on from that last question, my understanding is that, to have the all-electric, decarbonised, net-zero goal that we really want, we will have to produce and indeed consume about four or five times the present amount of electricity, from various sources. Here we are looking at an area that might reduce the growth of demand by some percentage—and the Minister mentioned the huge figure of some £2.5 billion. Can he give us some idea of what that percentage is? Will we use a quarter less electricity than otherwise, or half, or merely one-tenth? Can he give us a rough idea of where the money is going and what it is going to achieve?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I do not quite understand the noble Lord’s question. We will clearly use more electricity as we roll out more electric vehicles, the electrification of heating, et cetera—but we will use it in different ways. There are ways, for instance, in which we can do load spreading. One of the advantages of smart meters is that they allow people to consume electricity at different times and take advantage of different time-of-use tariffs, et cetera. So, as well as having particular peaks, we can also spread out those peaks over longer times of the day. There is a lot of demand management we can do, as well as increasing the amount of renewables we have on the grid, which we are doing.