Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Philip Dunne and Claire Perry

Tuesday 12th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

7. What steps he has taken to ensure diversity of supply in the energy market.

[The Minister for Energy and Clean Growth (Claire Perry)]

My right hon. Friend is quite right that we have a diverse energy supply and we must continue to maintain that, guided by the principles of lowest cost, lowest carbon and the maximum exploration of overseas trade opportunities. As the Secretary of State set out in his recent speech, we should continue to use market mechanisms wherever we can to maintain this diversity of supply.

[Mr Dunne]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that answer. However, can she reassure the House, and many of our constituents, that the move from the existing feed-in tariff to the smart export guarantee will not jeopardise the viability of solar energy anaerobic digester producers and that they will continue to be paid for exporting energy to the grid?

[Claire Perry]

My right hon. Friend is quite right. As I said earlier, we are very keen to ensure, through the smart export guarantee, that we move to the lower-subsidy or subsidy-free future that we know we can get to, but that we continue to see the sorts of viable projects that he references. I would urge him to make sure that the views of his constituents are reflected in the consultation that closes on 5 March.

Green GB Week and Clean Growth

Debate between Philip Dunne and Claire Perry

Monday 15th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Claire Perry]

The hon. Gentleman and I have had exchanges on this. He knows that we have committed £100 million from our current budget to invest in carbon capture, usage and storage technology. That money is being spent. We are working with several industrial clusters to work out how we decarbonise the power and get industry to put its emissions in there. Frankly, I was not the Minister at the time of the project’s cancellation, but we were going to spend £1 billion on decarbonising coal, which we no longer want in our mix at all, and we had not thought at all about how we would get industries in this area to put their emissions in. Since the pause of that competition, we have spent more than £300 million investigating our aquifers. They are the best in the world—offshore—and we will continue to explore how to do this in the most cost-effective way.

[Mr Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

I applaud my right hon. Friend’s initiative. First, with her announcement today, the Government are one of the first around the world to respond to the IPCC report, and secondly, she has taken the initiative of Green GB Week to provide more focus on this country’s achievements—it is leading the world—in developing clean growth. I encourage her to get her officials to come up with a rather more snappy means of demonstrating the metrics used to show that we can grow the economy and renewable energy at the same time. If I might give her a pointer in that regard, will she please work more closely with Ofgem to encourage pre-accreditation for anaerobic digestion plants, which will shortly run out of time to get installed to take advantage of the feed-in tariffs?

[Claire Perry]

My hon. Friend is the definition of “snappy”, so I will always take his advice on how to spice up any of these visuals. He is right that the way to make this acceptable is to make it visual and easy for people to understand. There is some very good stuff on the Green GB Week website, which I encourage him to look at. I will take away his point about pre-certification and perhaps we can discuss it at a separate time.