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Energy Bill

My Lords, I have put my name to this amendment and I thank the noble Baroness for having pursued this subject so strongly. I believe that this has been shown to work practically, particularly in other parts of Europe. I was pleased by the change in government policy in the Statement last week but I, too, believe where we put the cap to be important. To my mind, that clearly involves all microgeneration projects, but the cap should also enable and encourage communities to come together to provide solutions that are less effectively produced or applied by individual houses or households. That is one key area. I absolutely agree with the point, which my noble friend Lord Redesdale put well, that there is a level below which commercial projects do not take place. Therefore, what is there to lose below that level? I come back to the point about cost made by the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill. The extra cost to consumers is clearly significant, but it has taken considerable time to build up to that level. It is not unimportant, but in the first years of this scheme it will not be hugely significant. There is a more important point here. One of the key motivations for having feed-in tariffs is to encourage people to invest and take part in this technology. Including many more people in renewable energy is not only good but, as has been shown in Germany—I looked at the figures some months ago—when you increase the volumes of these technologies, their cost comes down quite significantly. That has certainly been the case in the solar photovoltaic area. One of my hopes and aspirations for feed-in tariffs is that the cost will come down because of the much more widespread use of the technology. I recognise that, because of the present supply chain problems, the opposite could happen in the short term, but we have to look beyond that. Certainly, heat needs to be included—the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, made an important contribution on the greater difficulty of that. But, again, heat is a good example of when this new form of tariff needs to be able to encourage community applications rather than just individual ones. That is more true of heat, which as we know accounts for a large proportion of total carbon emissions—some 47 per cent for the whole economy, although not all of that is available for the micro-sector, by a long way. But if we get this tariff right, we will be able to have community systems, which are particularly important with new-build and social housing.