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Energy: Electricity Supply

My Lords, like everyone else who has spoken, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tombs, for bringing his perennial debate before us once again. If I understood what he was saying at the beginning of his remarks, I am saddened that he is beginning to feel it is perhaps time that he ceased to carry the baton. I hope that he will carry it rather further into the future than his remarks appeared to imply. I agree with so much that my noble friend was saying about the nuclear industry. One of the dangers we have to face—it is not really a danger; it is a problem—is that nuclear exists. If we are to meet the Government’s policy objectives, it may be the only solution. I wanted to spend a few moments looking at government policy and its implications, because we now have some startling ambitions. The EU itself has recently come out with its policy of a 20 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020 and a 20 per cent increase in energy efficiency by 2020; a 20/2020 policy. The Government themselves have stated an ambition to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent from a 1990 figure by 2050. To put that in perspective, the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge in Tennessee has published a paper by Messrs Marland, Bowden and Andres which has figures for United Kingdom CO2 emissions back to 1751, would you believe. To hit the Government’s target, we have to get our CO2 emissions back to what they were in 1870, when the population of the country was only26 million. That is a severe target. My own party has pledged that an 80 per cent reduction by 2050 would be more appropriate. The same source suggests that that would take us back to the level of CO2 emissions in 1849, when the Industrial Revolution was really taking off and the population of the country was only 20.25 million. These are huge commitments. As the noble Lord, Lord Tombs, and my noble friend Lord Jenkin were saying, they place severe constraints on futureenergy policy. One only has to think of the leadtime for constructing a power station. I accept thatwe probably could build a nuclear power station in10 years, possibly on an existing site, but for most new power development it may be more realistic to consider 15 years to be the planning period. With the life of a plant being 30 years, that takes us to 2050, for when the Government have set these ambitious targets. The Opposition’s targets are even more ambitious. We should be quite clear that if the Government wish to achieve these targets, they will have to establish the rules that will make it possible. This is significant. We have freed our energy markets asfar as we can, but the fact is that the Government, and indeed society, will now have to look at these long-term implications. Realistically, we probably ought not to be constructing new electricity-generating plant that emits carbon dioxide at all from now on. I am aware of the issue of carbon sequestration. It is still an unproven technology. The cost estimates that I have seen are between $40 and $60 per tonne of carbon dioxide to be sequestered. That would work out as a huge on-cost of somewhere between £50 and £75 per tonne of coal used. One of the good things about this, if good there is in it, is that when you start to put those realistic figures into energy costs, all other sources become highly competitive. We have heard much about wind, but nothing about tidal. We have three large estuaries in this country that could provide a large amount of power: the Severn, obviously, the second most powerful estuary in the world, but, balanced on the clock, the Thames and the Humber could produce a verylarge part of the United Kingdom’s electricity. The Pentland Firth in Scotland has enough tide rip running through it to provide the whole of Scotland’s energy without any particular difficulty, apart from transmission problems and so on. As for finance, one should not belittle the problem, but currently I understand something like £2 trillion per annum is being invested in the oil and gas industry. Those who are responsible for that investment need to start looking seriously at the implications of what is happening for the future as a result of global warming, and to consider whether that investment is still appropriate. I declare a marginal interest: I am going to Russia on Saturday, where I suspect the Russians will try to brainwash me into the virtues of their oil and gas industry. I hope I come back, because I will be like a cat in the squire’s pigeon loft, trying to tell them that their investment needs to be regarded as short-term. Most of the world, in my view, will see the need to get out of these fuels before long. We talk so much about energy efficiency and hear about it in the industrial and domestic sectors—the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, was pressing this very much, particularly in relation to new build, although we have to tackle existing properties as well—but we do not hear energy efficiency talked about with regard to the electricity-generating industry itself. That point is well worth making. The figures are stark, and I am grateful to the DTI for them. I will express these figures, as the department did to me, in terawatt hours, a terawatt hour being 1 billion kilowatt hours. The total energy input to the electricity-generating industry in 2003 was 1,031 terawatt hours. The total energy generated was 399 terawatt hours. The difference between the input and the output was 632 terawatt hours. As the DTI says, somewhat drily, it was, "““dissipated in the form of waste heat or was used in the generating””," distribution, "““process, although it is not possible to estimate the relative magnitudes of either factor with accuracy””.—[Official Report, 20/6/05; col. WA 152.]" Heat is a huge industrial resource, produced by these industries in vast quantities. We do not know the exact amount of waste heat that is recoverable, but if it is only half that difference it still equals three-quarters of our annual generation. It would represent a huge increase in efficiency if that heat could be recovered and used, as it ought to be. Whether or not it is low-grade heat, which has no particular industrial use, is neither here nor there; my understanding of the principle of heat exchange is that it could be converted to a form of high-grade heat that might have an industrial use. Alternatively, it would be extremely useful in things like district heating and so on. That comes back to a separate issue that we have also heard about: planning. Ideally, even a nuclear power station ought to be somewhere like Battersea. Curiously enough, most of Battersea is plumbed to take waste heat from power stations, for obvious reasons. The plumbing is now totally redundant, of course, which is very sad. The use of that waste heat is something we can no longer afford to pass by. The Government will have to deal with that. I am aware that we are awaiting publication of the Climate Change Bill. It would be nice if the Minister could tell us at the end of the debate when we are likely to see it. I have heard rumours from the other end that there might be pre-legislative scrutiny. I do not think we need that particularly, because it will simply delay the process. What is important is to get the Bill out into the open so that it can be properly examined by both Houses of Parliament and we can begin to move this whole issue forward. Everything that has been said so far this morning indicates that time is short, and at the moment we are standing still.