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Renewable Energy (S&T Report)

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. I derived some comfort from hearing about his frustrations at the centre of government in dealing with renewable energy policy because I wanted to refer to more or less the same issue, albeit from the grass roots—perhaps I should say, ““the wood chip””—and talk about how, at a farm level, one tries to implement a renewable energy policy, when one sometimes faces conflicting pressures, some—not all—of which come from government. First, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, and to the right reverend Prelate for giving us the opportunity to speak in this debate. I pay particular tribute to the Select Committee for a report that I read with particular pleasure. It brought together for the first time—in my mind, anyway—some of the practicalities relating to renewable energy and the reasons why we appear to be drifting towards targets that we will not achieve. The trouble with renewable energy is that it is diffuse. It comes from different directions and does not fit in to the large generation schemes that we are used to. For those who are centrally planning, it must be a nightmare; they cannot predict when it will appear, and they cannot price it sensibly. There is a failure to reconcile the renewable energy sector with the existing infrastructure. If you are going to set targets for renewable energy, you have to look first at the requirements of the renewable energy sector and try to fit in appropriate arrangements. I do not think that anyone has seriously done that. As the committee points out in the report, the pricing arrangements under the new electricity trading arrangements are simply inappropriate. The balancing charges penalise the small generators, and much—not all—of the renewable generation of electricity will be small. There are, however, any number of participants in government and in trusts who will encourage feasibility studies, particularly for biomass. You would have thought that, with all that goodwill washing around, it would be fairly easy to set up some sort of commercial operation. However, as the report shows at, I think, box   10—I was privileged to be allowed to give evidence to the committee—I pointed out some of the difficulties that I had had trying to implement a small biomass scheme at farm level. Reading the report, I was particularly pleased that the Select Committee had visited Woking Borough Council. It was clear to me that, if we are drifting and losing the plot at the national level, that borough—at local level—has followed through on consistent, coherent policies, whatever administration may be in power, taking the low fruit first and moving on to more ambitious schemes and meeting some impressive targets. We are told in Appendix 7—pages 103 and 104—that the CO2 emissions of Woking Borough Council have been reduced by 15 per cent since 1990; that 84 per cent of electrical and thermal energy supplied to council properties is generated from sustainable sources; and that 3.9 per cent of the electrical energy generated is from renewable sources. That policy started with energy saving and using the money saved to fund further investment in different renewable projects, including combined heat and power plants right in the middle of Woking. Some of your Lordships may have seen them. Many people think that they are nothing less than incinerators and that they should be treated with great caution. They do not realise that they have just parked their car next to one and that there are no noxious toxins coming out of the top. People learn that those are something that they can buy into and they are proud to be part of a successful borough council. They also attract inward investment, an associated matter. In order to get around the iniquitous new electricity tariff arrangements, Woking Borough Council has gone to considerable cost—again with funds generated from its own projects over the years—to put in a private wire network. It is now selling electricity to houses and properties at something less than the full retail price, as opposed to the wholesale price, which is very different. I should have liked to start by declaring an interest and saying that, in my modest way, I was doing a small Woking Borough Council exercise on my farm. I have a large packhouse with 2,000 tonnes of refrigerated storage of fruit, with greater capacity, which is a large user of electricity. We have 300 or 400 acres of weald and woodland which used to be coppiced for charcoal and   for the coppice products that are now no longer commercially in demand. Nevertheless, wildlife requires or would appreciate the coppicing being restored. Again, there are a number of relatively modest schemes that Defra and the Forestry Authority have promoted to try to encourage people to coppice. If you are lucky enough to have a contract with a renewable energy supplier, Defra will give you money to plant acres and acres of willow or miscanthus, but   that is not at all what wildlife interests would wish—that is monoculture. Miscanthus has no value at all that I can think of. But if you were to restore some of the traditional woodlands—incidentally, south-east England is the most wooded region of England—you would have had a double whammy and succeeded on two fronts. It seems logical that we should have policies that combine nature conservation as well as renewable energy programmes. As I say, however, that proved very difficult and we were prevented by the punitive pricing for those who have to sell at the prices required under the NETA. However, there is no need for new research—the technology exists. Wood-chip operations exist at the farm scale in Denmark and Holland where you can buy a plant and install it. You can make wood chips from any number of products. We need—I hope that Mr Ben Gill’s report addresses it—a much more friendly regulatory approach. We also need an approach where we think small. It is very sensible to think small in renewable energy. It could even be the householder with his own wood-burning plant or solar panel with appropriate metering. They should be allowed to net off the cost of supplying the grid with electricity. The report refers to that. We may not be there yet, but it is something to aim for. The advantage is not so much in the amount of electricity that will be provided as—as the noble Lord,   Lord Whitty, said at the conclusion of his remarks—in the fact that we need to bring people into a commitment. If people think that their own lifestyle can contribute directly to producing renewable energy—and by installing solar panels they can make a modest contribution, inconvenient though it will be to the large electricity generators—it will help to win their hearts and minds, as the right reverend Prelate urges us to do.