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Energy Bill

I associate myself very much with the remarks that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson). We welcome greatly the distance that the Government have already travelled on this issue. In Committee, we were told that this was a step too far, and there was a sense that we would fail to include any aspect of heat in the Bill. It shows how far the Government have moved that we are considering in more detail today a proposal that was put into the Bill in the other place. There is no doubt that the issue has been overlooked for too long. About half the energy consumed in the United Kingdom is in the form of heat, and its generation is responsible for about 47 per cent. of our carbon emissions, so it must be a crucial part of the Government's carbon abatement programme. But all too often, it has been easy to overlook the importance of heat, because many different households are involved, it is complicated and the solutions have been less easy to consider than in other parts of energy policy. However, we are glad that the Government have sought to address the issue and have made progress on it. I very much endorse what has been said about the need for a clearer time scale. The concern is that we are moving in the right direction, but we do not know at what speed or when we might arrive at the conclusion that we want to reach. It is also right that there should be no threshold and that we should be thinking big and have big visions about what can be achieved. Clearly, any such threshold would have been regrettable. Just a couple of weeks ago, I visited a plant just outside my constituency that is operated by Southern Water and that takes all the waste from Burgess Hill and puts it through a very advanced, sophisticated system—the waste is put into a digester; the biogas that comes off is collected in a huge balloon and is used to power the generator; and the heat from the generator goes back to the digester and is used to assist the digestion process. It is very neat process. The only thing that is missed is the extra heat that is emitted as part of firing the boilers, which means that, as a result, some heat escapes into the atmosphere. The final link would be to capture that heat and supply it to businesses or homes that need extra heat. Lots of individual parts of the solution are being thought about, but what is sometimes missing is the element of joined-up thinking that draws them all together and makes it all happen in the manner that we want. I hope that the Government can give us some more detail, particularly on the time scale, because if investors and consumers want to get involved, they need greater clarity. There is also concern that the Lords amendment does not indicate the nature of the tariff and whether it can be varied according to technology types and energy sources. The Renewable Energy Association is concerned that the Lords amendment excludes biodiesel, as it refers to biogas and biomass. There is concern that it could be extremely problematic to have a definition of biomass in primary legislation for the first time that is possibly inconsistent with existing support mechanisms. The Renewable Energy Association suggests that the safest approach would be to use the definition of biomass found in the current renewables directive and the draft 2008 version. Biomethane is defined as gases produced by renewable sources, but it is possible to produce methane from biomass, and it looks as though that process may have been inadvertently left out. We generally welcome the fact that the Government have decided to accept the recommendation that heat should be addressed in the Bill, but there is an element of disappointment that things have been left so vague, especially with regard to the timing.