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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

Indeed I do. Part of my Bill deals with the promotion of what is described as ““community energy””. I shall come to that part later, and I hope that it will meet some of my hon. Friend’s concerns. Micro-generation and micro-power types of technology have clear economic and environmental advantages, but the market is small, which makes it less viable than it should be for households that wish to take advantage of that technology to do so, and for companies to invest in the technology necessary to manufacture micro-power units. The problem is that the installation costs of micro-generation can be quite high, and the payback period is relatively long. That makes micro-generation a niche product, available only to the better-off—although even now, prices are coming down. Opinion across the industry and in the non-governmental organisations is that we need to get into a virtuous circle, in which prices come down so that the market increases in size, which would lead to further reductions in the price of the product so that we can really take advantage of the potential of micro-generation.