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Energy Bill

My Lords, I do not know enough about how Ofgem works to know whether my noble friend Lord Jenkin is right that what the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, has said is not precise enough. However, I thought that the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, was brilliantly illuminating, and summed up what I see on the ground as the main problem of how wind energy developments are going. As I understood it, the noble Lord would leave Ofgem to operate as it wanted, but is attempting to alter its priorities. It would be interesting to know whether the chairman of Ofgem feels that that would be helpful. The truth is that the cart is being put before the horse all over the country; I see it across Scotland. Wind farms are being created without real reference to how what they produce will get into the grid, which is frankly terrifying. We do not even know whether the interconnector between Scotland and England will be sufficient to get energy to England should Scotland have the wit to produce more than it needs, which is what we want. It is also interesting that Denmark has to interconnect with neighbouring countries in case there is too much still weather there. We often get big areas being still over a number of weeks, and only other forms of generation can top up when wind fails. We are talking about big wind farm developments far out at sea, but not about the interconnector there. The cart is before the horse, and we must reverse it. I hope that the Minister can tell us—and I am sure that my noble friend Lord Jenkin will be interested to hear—whether this alteration of priorities from ““consumers”” to ““future consumers”” does the trick. If it does, it is extremely subtle and simple. The problem exists. Whether we need the more complicated, and perhaps unfortunate, vastly increased regulation of Ofgem I do not know. The problem that the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, outlined exists before our very eyes, and must be addressed extremely quickly.