Energy Security

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I disagree fundamentally with the noble Baroness. Sizewell C is an important investment. It is still at the planning stage at the moment. We will secure the funding for it and we will bring it on stream as quickly as we possibly can.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome my noble friend to the Front Bench again. This was a very important Statement, and I can think of no better man to handle this very challenging area faced by His Majesty’s Government. On the nuclear issue, can he reassure me that the small modular reactor programme from Rolls-Royce will not be side-lined? It seems to me a very exciting project—one that, to date, has gone well with the company, as I understand it, and with those who are working closely with it.

Secondly, as he knows, I have a genuine interest—it is nothing to declare—in what is termed in the Statement “nascent hydrogen”. I personally believe that we will see, quite possibly, a similar revolution to that which we saw when we moved from coal gas to North Sea oil. In this instance, it will be a mixture of gas from the North Sea and hydrogen. If that were to happen, that would be a major step for every household in the United Kingdom. Can I be reassured that that will not be forgotten, and that hydrogen is vitally important, not just for normal usage but for the air industry, in which I also have an interest, as my noble friend knows?

Finally, just on renewables, I did a little bit of research on offshore winds in the current situation. At this point in time, things are not going well. The primary problem appears to be that National Grid is unable to give a guarantee to connect to the main transmissions until 2030. Quite frankly, that is totally unacceptable for an industry that has done well, in which we have major investments. Somebody needs to shake it up somehow so that those on the offshore and the future investments know that they can speedily get connection to the grid.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his questions. I also thank him for welcoming me back to the Front Bench, although I was not aware that I had ever left it. Nevertheless, I am sure that his concern is well thought, and I thank him for that.

On SMRs, we are indeed continuing to support Rolls Royce; the figure is about £200 million-worth of support to accelerate the design of SMRs, because they will have a key role to play. My noble friend also asked me about hydrogen. We have a very advanced hydrogen strategy and will shortly be rolling out a business model. I can tell him that hydrogen for heating is not yet an established technology in its scalability. We have the ability to blend about 20% hydrogen into the current gas main, and in the Energy Bill, which we will shortly be considering, we are taking powers to conduct village-scale trials of hydrogen to check its feasibility for heating. I think it is more likely that the use of hydrogen will be in the sectors that are hard to decarbonise, such as steel or cement, or for really big, heavy, long-distance transport, such as locomotives or heavy goods vehicles.

My noble friend also makes a good point about the grid connections. As we seek to move the electricity system generally away from big nodes to a much more diversified system, clearly that requires an awful lot of new connections to be made. That is generally by pylons, but these can be extremely unpopular in various parts of the country. Nevertheless, that is something that we need to proceed with, but we need to try to do it in collaboration with local communities. Every offshore wind farm needs to be connected to shore and into the national grid to parts of the country that use the power. So there is a massive reconfiguring of the grid going on, with massive amounts of investment to bring that about. It is a project that will take many years to bring to fruition.