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Energy Bill

My Lords, I support noble Lords who have spoken in favour of feed-in tariffs. About five years ago, in my previous residence, my husband and I had solar panels for hot water and photovoltaic panels for generating electricity. I cannot say how excited I was, watching my electricity meter going backwards in the summer when I had the fridge, the freezer and the kettle on. I have to admit that my enthusiasm was positively childlike. In the winter, of course, I used electricity from the generating company because the hours of daylight were shorter. The sums of money that we got from the company were extraordinarily small, and it always struck me that it was doing much better out of this deal than I was. There should be proper recognition of people who are prepared to install microgeneration on their property and who feed amounts of electricity into the national grid. Those amounts may be generally quite small, but when we start to get them en masse they will produce a significant amount of electricity, and there should be proper recognition of that.