Lord Teverson
Main Page: Lord Teverson (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Lord Teverson
“Reduction of landfilling of organic waste
The Secretary of State must, as soon as reasonably practicable, set out a plan and timeframe for the reduction and eventual elimination of landfilling of organic waste in order to make it available for 100% renewable energy generation, and other appropriate uses consistent with the waste hierarchy as defined in the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011.”
Lord Teverson
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Judd, for supporting and putting his name to this amendment. Unfortunately, he is involved in the debate on Europe in the Chamber at the moment and cannot be here.
An obvious issue is sorting out and taking a much more robust approach to food waste. This arises within the context of a much broader issue. Worldwide, some 30% of all the food that is produced is lost between the field and the end consumer. In developed countries, it is mainly around wastage because we do not use our refrigerated produce quickly enough or we buy more than we need and throw it away. In non-developed countries, it is around the failure of the supply chain so that food is wasted, lost or defiled as it is distributed. We have one last chance to make up for what we have wasted at the end of the food chain by using it to produce energy and other materials. The amendment seeks to guide the United Kingdom more in that direction.
There is a double benefit here. First, renewable energy is produced and, secondly, the cost of landfill is substantially reduced. It has been estimated that landfill worth some half a billion pounds would be saved if we managed to treat all our food waste in this way. I shall come on to some of the practical experiences seen in parts of the UK and elsewhere in the world on food waste strategies, but let me go through the practicalities briefly. The amendment does not provide that this should happen immediately. It understands clearly that there is a timeframe and there must be a proper strategy which is worked through in a practical fashion during the following years. Having said that, we know that recycling works and that people are able and willing to sort their rubbish in different ways. In fact, food waste is already being segregated and taken away in a number of different areas.
In Wales, a food waste collection service is available to 88% of households. The technology is already in place and well proven, particularly in anaerobic digestion. A quite staggering estimate is that in Wales some £420-worth of food is wasted by each family every year, and I suspect that the figure is exactly the same for the rest of the UK. It represents food that has already been bought but is thrown away. It is much better to reduce such wastage first of all, but if that cannot be done, we need at least to use it later. In London, 23 out of 33 boroughs provide some sort of food waste collection. Fifteen boroughs are very adept at it and do well, but 10 still do not manage to undertake any food waste collection at all. It has also been estimated that if the whole of London managed to segregate and reuse its food waste, that would avoid some 900,000 tonnes of landfill which would save 400,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions and reduce landfill costs by £9 million. Again, that demonstrates the multifaceted benefits of doing this. This is strongly promoted elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Austria, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as in a number of municipalities in north America.
Given all that, what is there to lose? It is slightly more difficult because we have to make sure that households can segregate their food waste more easily. A number of households, of which mine is one, are deeply into composting so that uncooked food waste is used in the garden. I have become a real convert to composting over the past couple of years. However, we would win in many ways. We would see a major reduction in the cost of landfill. There would be a substantial source of renewable energy. I think that some 3% of our greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to methane, which is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases. We could really get our anaerobic digestion industry going, we would have landfill reductions and methane reductions and at the end of the process we would have a fantastic compostable material that can be used in gardens and on agricultural land to make sure that every aspect of the technology is used. I beg to move.
Baroness Verma
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Teverson for prompting a very important debate on setting targets for the landfilling of waste.
The amendment is designed to require the Secretary of State to set out a plan and timeframe, as soon as practicable, for reducing and eventually eliminating the landfilling of organic waste to make it available for renewable energy generation and other appropriate uses consistent with the waste hierarchy, as defined in the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011.
We support the minimisation of organic waste going into landfill and are sympathetic to the aims of this amendment. To date, we have made considerable progress. We have reduced the amount of food waste produced and encouraged separate food waste collections that are suitable for anaerobic digestion and composting. We have already seen a substantial increase in the number of anaerobic digesters generating energy from food waste and expect many more to come on stream in the next few years.
As noble Lords will be aware, there are currently targets, set out in the EU landfill directive, for reducing the amount of biodegradable municipal waste entering landfill. Those require the UK to reduce the amount of biodegradable municipal waste entering landfill in 2020 to 35% of the levels that entered landfill in 1995; the UK is currently on course to meet that. An EU review of those targets is under way as part of a wider review of EU waste policy and legislation. I must stress that the outcome of the EU review will not be known until mid-2014, but there is a possibility that the European Commission will propose setting new targets. Therefore it would not be appropriate to commit ourselves to targets in addition to those set by the EU, particularly at this point in time when the outcome of the review of the EU targets is still unknown.
The Government have worked very successfully with industry to reduce supply chain food waste by nearly 10% over the past three years. Household food waste is down by even more: 13% since 2006. As noble Lords have pointed out, we want to focus in particular on waste prevention, rather than landfill targets or restrictions. As noted in the 2011 waste strategy, preventing food waste is the most effective approach in carbon-saving terms, compared to landfilling. Each tonne of food waste prevented means that 4.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions are avoided. We believe that there are more efficient options than targets or restrictions in this area, with companies themselves knowing best where to make changes for maximum impact.
The voluntary approach has been shown to work and allows businesses to reduce waste and make themselves more efficient and competitive. We want to build on that work with businesses rather than impose targets or restrictions. As well as the continuation of the Courtauld agreement to reduce food and packaging waste in the retail and manufacturing sector, the Government have also recently launched a further voluntary agreement, which takes the same approach with the hospitality and food service sector.
We are also making progress in the collection and recycling of food waste, which is used to generate electricity by means of anaerobic digestion. Local authorities in the UK collected and recycled approximately 250,000 tonnes of separately collected food waste from households in 2011, which is a 54% increase on 2010. We expect that to be nearer 300,000 tonnes in 2013, which could provide electricity for 30,000 homes.
We can continue to support a growing anaerobic digestion industry without targets. Current evidence suggests that introducing further statutory targets would impact on businesses and local authorities in terms of compliance and monitoring, which would risk additional cost burdens on business.
I will respond briefly to a couple of points made by my noble friend Lord Teverson on the sector’s need for a plan that will avoid landfill from food waste. My noble friend will agree with me that the measures we are taking on anaerobic digestion are a success story. The Government have achieved their ambition of increasing the energy produced from anaerobic digestion of waste. The number of plants has increased from the 54 that existed when we published our strategy and action plan to 110. There are many other plants with planning permission in development.
We provide incentives for anaerobic digestion through the renewables obligation feed-in tariffs and the renewable heat incentive, which the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, asked about. We have also provided a £10 million anaerobic digestion loan fund through the Green Investment Bank, whose fund managers have already invested in AD plants. The action plan has also delivered a driving innovation anaerobic digestion fund that is helping to challenge costs in the industry and a range of other measures, including reducing red tape for businesses in the sector. All these measures are helping the sector to grow and achieve its potential. Like my noble friend Lord Teverson, I am a keen supporter of composting, but I suspect he is probably much better at it than I am.
The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, asked what the Government are doing to try to reduce the amount of food waste going to landfill. I referred to that in my speaking notes. We are working with business, and the voluntary approach has been successful. I hope that my noble friend finds my explanation reassuring and will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Teverson
My Lords, I thank the Minister for going through that. The momentum has been growing in this area, helped very much by the Government’s support measures. In the spirit of subsidiarity, I am not sure that the fact that European regulations might be coming along in the middle of next year should get in our way. I do not think that European directives stop member states having tougher environmental targets. That would be something. I would be strongly behind the Eurosceptics in resisting that. I am very pleased that the Minister mentioned the investment by the Green Investment Bank because a very large plant in Dagenham has been put forward for use by London boroughs. It is an excellent investment, and I do not think it would have happened without the Green Investment Bank. That is an example of how that has worked well.
I fundamentally believe that on certain occasions you use markets to a certain degree. When it comes to households rather than larger organisations, it is very difficult to make these processes commercial. I would never say that through legislation we should stop certain levels. This is not pollution, but it leads to pollution in terms of greater emissions. I understand there is momentum there. I shall think about this further. The momentum is good, so I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Worthington
My Lords, I support the amendment tabled in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Stephen and Lord Teverson. It is an excellent amendment, and had I been administratively competent enough, I am sure we would have tried to add our name to it because it raises an important aspect of this energy trilemma that we are trying to solve. As the noble Lord, Lord Stephen, eloquently pointed out, it is sadly missing from the Bill. This amendment or a similar amendment would be an excellent addition to it and would help to make it clear that this will be a very important part of the energy system. The reason it belongs in this Bill is because it is a significant move towards supporting the greater use of variable sources of electricity. As has been pointed out by previous speakers, one clear way of addressing the issues and challenges that variability creates is through the use of storage.
It is often—I think wrongly—stated that electricity cannot be stored. That is incorrect. It can be and is stored in many ways. We have heard of some of them today. Dinorwig is an amazing example. It was a government-funded public work, and it has been operated very successfully by a number of private companies. It is a jewel in the crown of our grid and provides fantastic, very fast and very efficient back-up at times of need.
However, there are many other sources. Hydro pump storage is not just in North Wales. There is an awful lot of it in Scotland, where it is a very reliable and well integrated source of renewable energy that has become at one with the environment in which it is located. These are technologies that were built in the 1950s and are still serving us today. They are amazing examples of what renewable energy can achieve. With the renewed interest in storage, a plethora of new approaches is emerging. I read with interest that GE, the wind turbine manufacturer, has launched a turbine that it is calling the “Brilliant” turbine. It is 2.5 megawatts and has a chemical storage facility built in to smooth the curves when wind power is operating or not operating. Obviously, that is a statement from the manufacturers that they can see a commercial advantage to being able to provide storage to help deal with the variability of the energy supply.
The Leighton Buzzard project was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Stephen. This is a fascinating and great example of where Britain can really excel. It is fairly straightforward engineering excellence at its best. The challenge is to take electricity at times of high supply using a filtration system to separate out nitrogen and then to cool the nitrogen as a liquid. That is the storage mechanism. Once it is heated and released, it can power a turbine. The great thing about the Leighton Buzzard project is that it is located next to a source of low-grade waste heat, which would otherwise be wasted, and that is helping to improve the efficiency of the system. These are exactly the sort of projects you can rely on the engineers and innovators of Britain to deliver. I really hope that we will see much more of such projects and more support for them.
The chemical project has also been mentioned—but I might have got this the wrong way round. The liquid air project is in Slough, and the chemical project—the 6 megawatt chemical battery, also mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Stephen—is the one in Leighton Buzzard, so I apologise for the confusion. Nevertheless, those are two examples.
There is also a wide amount of pre-existing distributed storage available on the grid in the form of Economy 7 and storage heating. This is another aspect of storage that has been slightly forgotten. When we had our initial push for nuclear power and found that we had an overabundance of power in the night, when there was not much use for it, a parallel process was introduced to encourage householders to fit storage heaters in order to absorb that excess electricity at times when it was cheap and use it to heat their homes. I do not see why that should be forgotten. I think it has an essential part and could now, with the advances we have made in smart metering and the information that will be available to consumers, provide another form of storage.
Lord Teverson
I will just point out that the noble Baroness is absolutely right about that. It is true that heating water by electricity can still be done. Storage heating has perhaps become less popular—most water heating is by gas—but there is still a substantial element of electrical water heating.
Baroness Worthington
I absolutely agree. If immersion heaters were now plugged into the grid and could be switched on at times of high supply, they would be a great source of storage on the network.
I do not want to take too much time, but I also mention one of my favourite discoveries of this year: the flywheels at Culham. A little-known fact of our grid is that the fusion research unit at Culham demands a huge burst of power in order to work, and it was deemed to be too great a demand to place on the grid. So, in the 1970s, flywheels were installed, which are still operating today, based on the flywheels that operate in Dinorwig. This is another example of fantastic engineering that solves a problem. I am dwelling on all these examples because I think they really show that, as our energy system transforms itself and as we embark on this road with, I hope, a very clear and unswerving purpose, we will solve many of the problems and obstacles that have been cited today as insuperable. Innovation in engineering is something we excel at and I expect that noble Lords will come forward with many more examples.
I turn to the amendment and the requirements to introduce a strategy and set a target. I am at times a little sceptical about the setting of targets, but I am very supportive of the idea of a strategy. Representatives from the industry have told me that they are very confused about how to interact with the Department of Energy and Climate Change. There is not a single point person in the department who really has an overview of this issue, and they have asked if we could raise that issue and ask that it be prioritised and given a home within the department. They tend to feel that they are being passed from side to side, with no-one taking overall responsibility for it. I think that is in part because the definition of “storage” is not quite clear, and this hits at a core issue. Dinorwig is classed as a generator and holds a generating licence, but if you have an Economy 7 storage facility in your home, you are not a generator. Lots of technologies may emerge that are somewhere in between because they are both absorbers and generators of power. They could offer very particular services to the system. Is there a need for a separate licence category for such operators? The Government need to think about this and perhaps come to a conclusion. In the course of writing a strategy, I am sure that this is one of the things that needs to be addressed.
This becomes particularly important in relation to the distribution network operators. We tabled amendments in earlier Committee sittings to tease out the fact that the DNOs are currently preparing the business strategies which they will implement over the next eight years. It is my strongly held belief that the capacity mechanism within this Bill, if it is done correctly, could have a dramatic effect on the introduction of electricity storage, and therefore should have a material impact on the DNO strategies. We have said before that it seems crazy to be signing off on DNO strategies before the detail of this Bill and the capacity mechanism within it is fully worked through.
The Electricity Storage Network, which is the relevant trade association, has pointed out that support for electricity storage is currently available. It is not quite clear from the briefing whether the grant is worth £30 million or £50 million, but it is clear that the Government are making available some tens of millions of pounds for grid-scale demonstrations of storage. That is very welcome indeed. However, the association makes a point which makes sense to me: if you spend that kind of money on the demonstration but you do not have a policy to secure the route to market, that is effectively wasted money. What the sector is really looking for is a clear signal that it will be able to participate in the capacity mechanism and that there will be a way in which it can compete against the other potential sources of capacity that will be brought forward. The problem is that we are dealing with what is essentially quite a new set of technologies which is facing all the challenges that you would associate with that. Potentially, these technologies could be commercially viable, but they are not yet. How can they compete in a capacity market that essentially seeks to be technology neutral and provide one price for all? This is a contradiction in the proposals being made by the Government that really needs to be thought through.
The Bill makes it clear that on the supply side, when it comes to supporting low-carbon electricity supplies, the Government have accepted that we need a tailored strategy for the different technologies. We have differentiated strike prices as well as different treatment for nuclear and renewables—and within the renewables category, there is an enormous difference in approach. The reason for that is that the Government recognise that in bringing forward the low-carbon economy, it is not just a question of the least cost initially because these technologies are at different stages of development. The Government have expressed a desire to bring forward a range of technologies and not simply to compare them all against levelised cost. It is more subtle than that. Those interests may include the ability to establish a supply chain, which might have a material bearing on how we support certain technologies. The Government have gone so far as to create a levy control framework which is split up into the different technologies and potentially into different sizes of technologies, and even into different locations. I say that because on the supply side it is clear that the Government accept that one size fits all will not work and that different policies need to be brought forward in order to help all the various technologies at their different stages of development.
The demand management and reduction side is thrown out of the window and we are told that all technologies must be able to compete on a level playing field. What I would argue is that that simply will not work for those technologies which are less far along the development curve. Those include electricity storage, which has huge potential and will be very important, but at the moment would find it extremely hard to compete against the existing coal-fired generators, with gas that has just been mothballed or, indeed, potentially with new CCGT, although I hope it would be able to compete with it. I would simply state that on the supply side, the Bill recognises the need for differentiated approaches, but when it comes to the demand side we take a completely different approach. I would like to hear from the Minister what the justification is for those very different approaches. I am sure that she will respond by saying “the least cost”, but if it is a question of the least cost, the argument should apply to both sides. There must be something different on demand to which we are applying a different logic, and I would like to hear what it is.
Baroness Worthington
I thank the noble Lord for giving way. I want to clarify that, as I said in my speech at Second Reading and as I have consistently said in Committee, I agree with the setting of outcomes in terms of what the Government want to achieve. However, I am nervous of the micromanagement of individual technologies through ever smaller targets. An editorial in the Financial Times this week asked why we could not have a process where the Government set the objectives and the market chose the least costly and most sensible solution. I have consistently said that is what we should be doing. This Bill is not taking that approach and I fear that another very specific technology target might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Lord Teverson
I point out to the noble Baroness that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is saying that we do not need a post-2020 renewables target for precisely that reason.
Baroness Worthington
I am sorry to raise this again as we are sparking up another debate here. There might well be concerns about a specific post-2020 renewables target but it is strange that the Secretary of State should not be more strongly advocating a decarbonisation target as this is necessary. We can carry on with this offline.