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Department of Energy and Climate Change

My Lords, I declare an interest as a current member of Sub-Committee B of the European Union Committee, which is imminently to report on the renewable energy replacement 20 per cent reduction by 2020. While welcoming the Minister’s report, I have to dampen some of his enthusiasm about the potential for achieving his targets given the appalling state of the technical supply chain in this country. In the event that we were to depend on what is available now, the Minister would have had to commence the wind farm programme on the seventh birthday of Jesus Christ. That would fully utilise the existing resource of offshore maritime installation facilities. It takes eight months to produce one offshore wind farm comprising 34 turbines. There are only two ships available in this country with the necessary cranage platforms capable of taking the turbines out to sea, and one of those has an unfortunate tendency to sink when it gets there. In the event that the boat capability was available to generate the development of these wind farms, somebody has got to find a way of very quickly building about 50 more of them at about £12 million each. There are none in production at present, so we have very limited resources with which to go forward. In addition, there are two further major supply chain problems on which the Government could do something urgently. There is no gearbox capable of providing the optimum generation that can handle wind shifts of between 12 and 40 miles an hour. The only one that is available is—