Solar Industry

Matt Western Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Antoinette Sandbach]

I agree that is worrying. I would argue that small-scale renewables encourage our constituents to get involved in a whole green agenda and to look at their homes and their energy use in a completely different way. If we combined that with energy efficiency measures, we would start to get some dramatic change in the sector. There is a big opportunity for the Minister regarding energy efficiency, as well as in combination with renewables.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Antoinette Sandbach]

This will have to be the last intervention.

[Matt Western]

The hon. Lady is being very generous, and I commend her for bringing the matter before us. From 2012 to 2018 we saw an 80% reduction in installations. We were democratising energy; a powerful thing was going on in this country. It is so important that the sector has some certainty—such as a 10-year plan— to ensure that we deliver.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

The hon. Gentleman will have heard in my speech that I have been arguing for that certainty. The consultation closed four hours ago, so the Minister will not yet have had time to consider the responses, but I think that, from the debate, she will appreciate the urgency of doing so. I hope that she can offer answers to my questions and reassurance to those who have backed renewables. We are rightly proud of our position as a world leader in renewables technology and climate change, and I hope that the Government will take concrete steps to keep us in that positive position.

--- Later in debate ---

[Claire Perry]

I will touch on that good point about community. Many good schemes operate across various local authorities.

The feed-in tariff scheme has been an effective part of our great decarbonisation journey. Since 2010, the scheme has supported more than 830,000 installations, 99% of which are solar and are currently generating about 3% of total electricity consumption. Also, a few things have changed since that time, as the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) will know. We have seen a dramatic fall in the cost of solar installation—up to 80% in some cases—which is to be welcomed, as it makes that more accessible to many people. We have also seen a dramatic fall in the cost of other renewable energies.

I like the phrase the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) used: the democratisation of energy. We are all participating, and one of the great benefits is that the hugely important technology that is offshore wind now costs the same, effectively, as building a new gas-fired power plant. That is a benefit to us all and to all our bills.

The feed-in tariff scheme has cost us almost £6 billion to date, and over its lifetime it will continue to cost us all about £30 billion, on many of our bills. It was absolutely right, therefore, that the decision was taken—before my time—to close the scheme. As we move to a lower-cost solar environment, and to a world in which we are rapidly seeing price parity between renewables and non-renewables technology, it is important to think about the impact on bills.

[Matt Western]

With all the new build housing that is going up, does the Minister think the Government could be a lot more ambitious? There are hundreds of thousands of houses, which is terrific, but we are so unambitious in enabling people to have that democratisation of energy from within their own properties.

[Claire Perry]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that we have some of the tightest energy efficiency standards for new homes, but I totally agree that we need to go further, and my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government are looking at that right now. Under this Government, we will build millions of homes; that is absolutely part of our ambition, and it is right that we make them as energy efficient as possible and that they contribute as much as possible to this revolution.

I want to focus on a couple of the challenges that my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury emphasised, one of which is the concern about jobs. We have seen a healthy supply chain build up and it is exciting that we are already seeing subsidy-free solar projects at scale being brought forward. One consultant’s estimates tell us that 2.3 GW of solar projects already in the system in the UK with, or awaiting, planning permission could be delivered without subsidy. Lightsource, which has just been bought by BP, says that it is developing 300 MW of subsidy-free projects backed by power purchase agreements, some of which will be delivered during 2019. So we are starting to see solar being delivered at scale without subsidy—indeed, I opened the country’s first subsidy-free solar farm in my first few weeks in the job. That is incredibly exciting, and I am very ambitious for the jobs that will be created over the next few years.