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Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

Such matters must be weighed up. We are discussing whether an annual approach is the most efficacious, and I am raising some doubts about that. When my hon. Friend sums up the debate, he will no doubt seek to change my mind. When we go on to examine the detail of the measure that my hon. Friend outlined, other questions must be asked. Given that it calls for a yearly report to be laid before Parliament, what is Parliament expected to do as a result? I hope he is not suggesting that we get into the ghastly provinces of early-day motions and rather feeble Adjournment debates, where Members of Parliament unburden themselves, usually unheard by most people and listened to by few. Such a response to the proposed annual report would have no effect whatever. I am delighted that the Minister is conducting a review of energy requirements and I look forward to its outcome. I support what the Prime Minister said on Wednesday about energy and energy supplies, and the spirit in which he said it. If it meant what I thought it meant, he will have my support on that matter. How is Parliament supposed to react to a report on energy consumption every year? Not much at all, I hope. It would make no sense for us to react on an annual basis to movements one way or another in the amount of energy consumed in the United Kingdom year by year. Next we come to a more interesting part of my hon. Friend’s new clause. The report will seek to identify—I choose my words carefully—"““those sources of energy mentioned in section 82(7) of the Energy Act 2004 (c. 20) (microgeneration)””." I hope my hon. Friend will refer to this when he sums up. I wonder whether we have any certainty or confidence in our ability to identify, in a useful and usable way, the production of energy by, for example, windmills, solar panels, tide, biomass or any of the other trendy means to which people are so attracted. I cannot conceive how, in a meaningful way and with figures on which we could rely year by year, even the Government, with all the resources at their disposal, could identify the production of energy by those various means. Surveys could no doubt be done and questions asked, but would we get real figures, particularly for domestic installations of little windmills, solar panels and the like? I concede that tidal installations would be a much easier proposition, but I question whether we could get real, reliable figures at the micro level of detail. I hope to be reassured. Nuclear energy, on the face of it, looks much easier, except for the fact that my hon. Friend mentioned—the interconnector. When we come to the import of energy, I pose another question to which I do not know the answer. It is always risky to ask a question to which one does not know the answer, but since we are among friends, having a private conversation in the Chamber on a Friday, I feel a little freer to ask such a question. In the context of the import of energy and the interconnector, do we know the sources of that energy? If electricity comes flowing across from our friends in France, do we know whether is it generated by their nuclear installations or from other sources, perhaps fossil? We would certainly want to know that, in the context of the new clause and the Bill, but I am not sure that we could be confident of that. The same applies to fossil fuels. Again, it is one thing to seek to identify the amount of energy consumed overall, but is it possible to identify energy consumed in terms of its production from different types of fossil fuel, as opposed to nuclear, whether imported or not, and microgenerating sources, and what value would that have?