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Energy: Renewables (EUC Report)

My Lords, I do not know whether I qualify as someone who knows more about the subject than the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, but I reiterate the great urgency of the situation if we are to meet our renewable targets. At the same time, I sound a note of caution for any Government of whatever colour about what will happen if there are power failures and the lights go out. We need to get a move on in the energy field. With regard to wind power, it is something of a puzzle to me that when I went to Wellington in New Zealand last year, the first place I was taken was up a hill to see a wind turbine that was a tourist attraction and to which large numbers of people came because they thought it was well worth looking at. If ever the old adage ““beauty is in the eye of the beholder”” held any truth, it was certainly not contradicted there. We react with shock horror to wind farms, but they are actually not permanent blots on the landscape, if that is how people wish to refer to them; they could be taken down and improved. Much of the resistance should be taken care of in the most sensitive areas, but I am sure we are going to have to agree to wind farms in many areas. It was rather appropriate that we should have had a Planning Bill and an Energy Bill at the same time as the committee was deliberating. I am disappointed that we are still talking about 50 megawatts being the lower limit, as it were, for the Infrastructure Planning Commission. That may have to be revisited—a lower limit should be appropriate. Regarding the domestic feed-in tariff, it was evident to the committee on our visit to Brussels that in both Germany and Spain a good deal more energy is generated at home by photovoltaic cells. While one might say that the Spanish have a lot of sunshine so this method might be appropriate, I am not aware that it is any sunnier in Germany than it is here. However, it has the advantage of a feed-in tariff that gives generous levels, which would encourage more people to fit photovoltaic cells. If we are going to have two-way meters, and if we are not going to pay large grants to people, there has to be some financial incentive to people to go ahead and put these in. A big industry could be set up quite quickly to install them. The things on people’s roofs have very little impact on the environment because many of them can be easily hidden away. One thing that we discussed which concerned me was the question of certificates of origin, which would be traded and which give people confidence that what they are buying results in good being done. I am thinking of garden furniture, where a certificate of origin is often a label tied around the chair that you buy saying, ““The teak from which this was made was harvested in sustainable forests in Indonesia””. I just do not believe it. We need to have a system of certificates of origin where we can have confidence that the people trading them have genuinely saved the carbon and have done so for a long time, not just last week or something. It must be a continued saving, going into the future. I also look forward to the efficiency targets, which I know are coming in the spring. The last thing I want to say concerns the management of the grid. Far be it from me to cast aspersions on witnesses who came before us, but Ofgem was not very convincing. In my view it was extremely cautious, it referred to the objectives that were set for it by the Government and it had to have the needs of present-day consumers in the forefront of its mind. To some extent, if you take the needs of present consumers too much into account, it could be at the expense of consumers in years to come. There may well be a price to pay immediately in order to get the whole process going. I hope that Ofgem will address this issue, as it must also address the issues of the management of the grid. The grid, as we know, was designed with the idea of central power stations radiating outwards. It is likely that a lot of this renewable energy will be generated on the periphery of the United Kingdom, and we will have to be able to bring it towards the centre. Again, this seems to be an urgent problem that goes beyond the immediate economics of the next two or three years.