Lord Lucas
Main Page: Lord Lucas (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)Fuel: Electricity Supply Licences
Lord Lucas Excerpts
Lord Lucas
That this House regrets that the draft Modifications to the Standard Conditions of Electricity Supply Licences disappoint the legitimate expectations of businesses who placed reliance on Government announcements as to the availability and amount of subsidy, and favours the least efficient forms of solar electricity generation.
Relevant document: 34th Report from the Merits Committee
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I have no interest to declare in solar energy. Indeed, I am something of a sceptic and regard the subsidies we are discussing today as something of an unwelcome and unjustified imposition on the public. I am all in favour of the measures that the Government are taking to control the cost of these subsidies, but I regret—putting it gently—the way in which they have chosen to do that. I believe that they breach the trust that ought to exist between Governments and those who place faith in what they have said. The measure fails to take account of the opportunities for building new industries in this area, and it has been structured so as to be a much harsher imposition on consumers than it needs to be.
Before the election, we, the Conservative Party, were talking in terms of extending the limits of the feed-in tariff for solar to 10 megawatts—that is, if you are to believe Friends of the Earth. Personally, I do not often do so, but I suspect that the Government are more favourable towards them. However, on 1 February 2010, the Government said that adjustments would be made to the feed-in tariff,
“as evidence on actual deployment, costs and performance emerges … with the first review due to take place in 2013”,
subject to degression in the level of feed-in tariff from 31 March 2012. The meaning of that seems plain to me: anything that you get under way before 1 April 2012 will be at the stated tariff. Fine, that was said by a previous Government, but new Governments cannot just tear up what has been said before, which is what we appear to be doing.
Lord Marland
My Lords, I can answer that straightaway. Let me make it clear that we considered every option. A whole magnitude of options are put forward in reviews and consultations with industry, so of course we considered other options. However, the option that was actually put to us, largely by industry, suggested that the contribution of FITs was going to be even more expensive than it is now, and I am afraid that that was an option that we were not going to embark upon.
In closing, I see no real sense in the feed-in tariff at the level that it was. We have made the right and brave decision. It is a decision to support the consumer, which is obviously a priority for the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. It saves consumers from a vast increase in bills on a form of electricity generation that is not really going to impact on the importance and size of the problem ahead of us.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his reply, except that he did not actually reply to the last questions I asked him. I would very much appreciate the opportunity to come and see him to ask them again. They are: how are we going to deal with distributed generation in the energy market review, and what plans are we making for the day when solar becomes a competitive source?
Lord Marland
I can respond to that. I do not intend to respond to questions on the broad scope of electricity generation in this debate. If the noble Lord had attended the debate on our electricity market reform Statement, or if he wishes to read the paper that was published this week, he would see how we are attempting to deal with the supply and demand side. It is a very big subject that unfortunately I do not feel I can cover now.
Lord Lucas
I am not trying to tempt my noble friend to do so. I am merely trying to tempt him to spend some of his time subsequently discussing it with me. I agree that the EMR review is an interesting paper, and I have read it with great interest. However, I think it misses the point about solar.
I will argue with my noble friend about his use of the term “not retrospective”, and I suspect that my noble friend Lord Liverpool would too. If you put a lot of money into a project and the Government then produce a cut-off that makes it impossible to realise that project, while there may be a few lucky people in Cornwall, there are a lot of unlucky people elsewhere who are losing what for them is a lot of money, even if it is not for the Government. I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.