---

Energy Bill

My Lords, it may be of interest to noble Lords to hear that just this afternoon we had a visiting delegation of three senators from Texas. When asked about feed-in tariffs—to put it in simple language, how far the clock goes backwards—they said that the clock on an individual farm or house producing electricity could go back only to zero. In other words, they can reduce their bill by producing electricity but cannot actually feed significant power in. The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, referred to having a simple rule, and that is a simple Texas rule—and, as we have just commented, Shell has moved from London to Texas. I am not advocating this necessarily, but that is a simple rule and surely we can find such a rule with incentives. The role of community power is vital. We have already moved a long way in the UK in thinking about devolved and smaller-scale energy systems, and this should be part of it. But we need to ensure that there are still proper investments for people putting in small and medium-sized power systems, such as those in rivers, which are penalised at the moment by the 50-kilowatt rule. We need to have clear rules and I support the amendment.