Queen's Speech

Lord James of Blackheath Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord James of Blackheath]

My Lords, by this hour of the evening I had confidently been expecting to rip up my speech on the grounds that everything that I had to say would have been said already. However, the only thing to which that applies is the congratulations to my noble friends Lady Wilcox and Lord Henley and, as that has been said so often, I hope that they will take it on the nod.

Unfortunately for your Lordships, my subject is going to be renewable energy, about which a great deal has already been heard, but it will come from a direction that no one has touched on at all so far. I should like an assurance from members of the previous Government that the undertakings given to this House in the last address on renewable energy before the election hold good and that the target of a 20 per cent reduction in carbon by 2020 is on course to be met. I have very serious doubts about it. I remind your Lordships that at that time we were told that between 8 and 9 percentage points of the target had been achieved from existing technology and that there was every expectation of the other 12 percentage points being reached between now and 2020. However, we were then told separately that, in order to achieve that, the Government had acquired control of five former estates from the Crown Estate and, in a report on the Crown Estate handing over the land, we were told by the Prime Minister, no less, that he was making available £75 billion for the completion of the wind farms to be placed on those estates.

Seventy-five billion pounds is a lot of money. It is nearly three times the amount that was originally estimated by the Select Committee, which suggested that wind could achieve the 2020 target had we started three years earlier. I would like to know where the £75 billion is today. I suspect that the previous Government have left this country in the position of one of those awful Twenty20 cricket matches with 70 runs to score off 10 balls, which is impossible. I do not think that we can get there by 2020, even with £75 billion. I hope that someone remembered to ask the outgoing Prime Minister, before he went back to Kirkcaldy, for the key to the safe holding the £75 billion. If we cannot spend it on the wind farms, can we please have it for reducing the national debt, as it would be very welcome indeed? Where is it?

If what I suspect is the case, what will we do about meeting the 2020 target? It matters financially. Apart from the need for a cheap source of sustainable energy, which is much more important at the moment than the issue of global warming—I confidently expect to die of hypothermia long before I am dead of carbon poisoning—is there an alternative fallback plan, which can be picked up by the new Government, for how to meet the 2020 target? If we do not meet it, Europe will crucify us with carbon penalty charges after 2020 and we shall have no defence against that if we do not hit the target. What will we do? There is a squeak of a chance of an alternative strategy. I hope that the new Government will make an urgent audit of the viability of the present 2020 programme and assess any alternative.

The previous Government ran a competition for clean coal among four possible contenders for a major government contract and each of them was ready to go with its final bid. My suggestion to the present Government would be to forget immediately the competition and to put all four of those contenders on to a contract, subject to the understanding that they must go for pre-combustion carbon extraction, not post-combustion, and that the contracts are paid on a commercially viable economic basis, with the eventual winner—the one producing the best result—having control of that project.

Some interesting and helpful data on this have come from Durham University and were provided to the ministerial advisory panel, the ACCAT. Had the Government started in 2009, which they clearly did not, they would have achieved 10 per cent of the entire 2020 target simply on pre-combustion coal cleaning. In the event, we are one year behind that. However, there is good news. Professor Gluyas of Durham University has undertaken an assessment—from my days leading survey work on the North Sea, I am not surprised about this—showing that there are 3 billion barrels of oil waiting to be extracted from the North Sea which are not included in any of the current reserves. Unfortunately, that is carbon-intensive, but if we follow the American example from Great Plains, North Dakota, it would be possible to take that technology, which is now ready to roll in Teesside, and to use the extraction of those 3 billion barrels, which would be a huge contribution, if cleaned, towards meeting the 2020 target. We could extract carbon on a clean-coal basis for three years to come, say, and then use the carbon extracted from that coal to wash through the high-carbon-intensive oil taken from the North Sea with the result that we would then have 3 billion clean barrels of oil, which would effectively close the gap in meeting our 2020 target. The technique has worked for 10 years in North Dakota—it is proven and it is good.

There are other things that we could do. We could easily devote more time and effort to the one renewable energy strategy where we are unarguably the world leader: seabed tidal work. Forget the waves—the waves do not work, but tidal does. We absolutely have to have a vigorous defence of the growing threats that Europe is bringing to our dominance of the Dogger Bank, which has the biggest concentration of tidal flows in the world. If we could find a way of linking it properly to the grid, it would be sufficient to provide the entire carbon-free energy needs of the United Kingdom. If the Government would give proper stimulation to a competition among universities and researchers as to how we could create the link between the grid and the tidal power, we would have a ready-made winner.

It is all doable, but not if we continue to believe that the old strategy left behind by the old Government is workable and will be delivered. It will not. We have to have a new strategy and it has to start now.