Energy Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak after the right reverend Prelate and to hear of the encouraging things happening in his diocese. We also heard him mention the fact that they have a cost. He is possibly the first speaker in this debate who has drawn attention to cost; I shall spend quite a lot of my time talking about exactly that.

This is a technical Bill but it has a simple purpose: to give effect to the British energy security policy. In my view, that means ensuring that energy is available abundantly and affordably to the British people and to British industry and businesses, and also that energy is, as far as possible, secure against external shocks. That is how we maintain and enhance our prosperity, and any other statement of the Government’s objective would appear to me to be traducing the obligations we have to the nation.

Net zero is not an energy strategy but a constraint on how we might achieve our energy strategy. Nobody seriously thinks that the UK’s commitment to achieve net zero by 2050 will have any significant effect on the heating of the planet, since we produce only 1% of global emissions. At best, it is setting an example to the world; its practical effect will be very small indeed. The core strategy for this Government has to remain abundant and affordable energy for the UK. If my noble friend on the Front Bench disagrees about that, I am sure he will say so when he winds up. The question is how the Bill and the energy strategy it effectuates measure up to that objective. It is a mixed bag and, like other speakers, in the interests of time I will be fairly selective about the parts of the Bill I choose to focus on at this stage.

One of the things the Bill does is encourage investment in wind power. Despite claims that the cost of wind power is constantly falling, that is simply not true. Although it has fallen from its early days, it is ceasing to fall; the fall is declining as a result of the maturity of the industry, as you would expect with any industry that matures. But even if the marginal cost of wind power can be brought down to something close to zero—in other words, that it is similar to nuclear power in that regard—none the less, the capital costs required would still require subsidies, in addition to the feed-in tariff, and these are very large indeed when it comes to offshore wind.

Moreover, despite providing in excess of 20% of our energy, there are many days when wind power falls close to zero, and much the same can be said of solar. This means that gas generation has to be available to take up the slack at those times. I heard the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, envisage a day when demand for gas would be zero. I do not understand what source of power she imagines will take up the slack when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

I challenge the noble Lord to say where I said that the need for gas would be zero. I said it would be minuscule.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am happy to accept the correction from zero to minuscule because it does not change my argument in the slightest. I thought I had said close to zero, but either way I am more than happy to accept the word “minuscule”. I was hoping when the noble Baroness stood up that it would be to tell me what fuel it was that was going to take up the slack in the place of gas.

To make demand for gas intermittent in order to match the intermittency of wind power is, in the words of Professor Sir Dieter Helm,

“devastating to the economics of gas generation and for two reasons”.

First, it takes a much longer time to recover the capital costs, and, secondly, because the gas power is demanded only intermittently, the cost of producing that supply increases as well. So in addition to the high cost of wind generation, we have to take account of an inevitable increase in the cost of electricity generated by gas simply to match it and make up for the intermittency. Professor Helm is a great supporter and advocate of net zero. His complaint is that we are not being honest with the British public about the costs of it. My noble friend the Minister will be able to say whether he thinks the Government are being honest with the British public and that Professor Helm has got it wrong, but net zero is not cheap and the Government need to level with the public. They need to show that their energy strategy is affordable.

Then we come to the question of abundance. The noble Baroness, Lady Blake, referred, as did other speakers, to Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine. My worry was that she had not taken account of how radically that has changed our situation, but my worry on that score rather fell away when I heard my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford. He explained very clearly that it is not some minor event; it is a radical change in the energy supply market, and it goes to the question of whether we are going to be able to maintain abundant supplies.

The noble Baroness called for three things to happen simultaneously as a result of the Bill: she wanted to cut bills, increase security and tackle climate change—I hope I have referred to her correctly. My point is that you cannot have all three. The second two require higher bills because the cost of them is largely borne by bill payers rather than taxpayers. Even if you take it out of the bills and put it on to the taxpayers, the taxpayers are of course the bill payers with a different hat on.

There are things in this Bill that I agree with. I was particularly pleased to see the reference to the promotion of nuclear fusion. It may be a very long way off—nuclear fusion as a solution has always been a long way off—and that makes one a bit sceptical, but I have confidence that something can be done. Nuclear fusion is of course an extremely clean form of energy, not like nuclear fission, and the UK Atomic Energy Authority is a leader in the field. At the moment there are half a dozen places throughout the country competing to be the home of the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s spherical tokamak, which is going to take forward Britain’s next step in developing the prospect of genuine nuclear fusion. If anything, I would encourage the Government to spend more money, as I am told that that would speed up the work; that is all very good. Nuclear fission will be core to providing our baseload, and I welcome the work the Government have done to promote that as well. But large amounts of gas will remain absolutely indispensable to our energy mix—all the more so the more we rely on wind and solar.

The gaping hole in this Bill and this strategy—not only the hole referred to by my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford, in that we are not sufficiently encouraging increased oil production among the oil producers—is, as far as our domestic policy is concerned, its failure to put increased domestic production of gas at the heart of our energy strategy.