Renewable Energy: Costs

Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard (UUP)]

My Lords I welcome the opportunity to speak in this important debate and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Frost, for securing it. The renewable energy system stems from the climate change issue, so we cannot look at one in isolation without the other. I am interested in the noble Lord, Lord Frost, saying that there is no consensus around some of the figures and costings. I assume that that is because some of those estimates are just guesstimates at a high level, as opposed to having any significant background to the figures.

I am concerned about climate change, as I am sure most in this House are. I want to see renewable energy and I support it, but it all comes at a cost. We have to devise that cost in a practical manner and not just set targets that cannot be achieved. In Northern Ireland, we have set targets that I do not believe are achievable—in fact, we have missed all our early targets on climate change.

It also comes sometimes at an environmental cost. In the early 1950s, a renewable project—a hydro-plant—was built at Ballyshannon, in the Republic of Ireland, using the water that flows from Lough Erne in County Fermanagh. That has had huge environmental challenges, not least in that it has decimated the salmon and eel industries in Lough Erne. The salmon, eel and other fish trying to get back up through the hydro-plant have been slaughtered. They have been cut and killed by the blades of the hydro-plant, and that has reduced the number of fish stocks within Lough Erne. This has been a huge environmental disaster in County Fermanagh, so we need to be careful about how we do this. Just a few years ago, hundreds of thousands of eels were trapped in that hydro-plant and killed. That is a huge loss to the environment in County Fermanagh and to Lough Erne.

We do not always have sun shining and wind blowing, so we need to find other back-up mechanisms. I accept that other aspects, such as wave energy, might be more reliable. We need to do this in a managed way. In Northern Ireland, we had the renewable heat incentive, or RHI, which turned out to be an absolute disaster. We cannot now invest in further renewable incentives in Northern Ireland; we are pouring money back from the Executive every year, simply because we are not allowed to utilise that funding while the RHI is still in place. It has been a disaster not only for the Government and the Executive but for many of those genuine users who have invested millions of pounds into projects that they now cannot make pay, and who are returning to conventional types of heating such as oil and coal. We need to be careful in what we do and how we do it. That is why we should not rush into issues that are not reasonable.

Last December, I attended a seminar led by government and executive officials in Northern Ireland. We were told that, by 2027—in just three years—it will cost government departments in the small area of Northern Ireland £2.3 billion to implement climate change policies up to that point, and that is not to talk of what it will cost businesses, ordinary householders and the public.