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Energy Bill

My Lords, as one of the protagonists who tried to change the Government’s mind on feed-in tariffs, I welcome their conversion during the progress of the Bill. I also welcome, in a lukewarm manner, the 5 megawatt limit. Like others, I argued that there is no need for a limit, not because we wanted to undermine the ROC scheme—we believe in it—but because there are different sorts of users who are likely to use the feed-in tariff mechanism and therefore the two could coexist. The majority of such users will benefit from a 5 megawatt limit. For example, community schemes, farmers, single site operators and so forth will greatly benefit from the Government’s move. While I understand that the Government need a bit of flexibility in case special cases arise, I hope that they will not make it too complicated by setting different limits for different sorts of application. Subject to that, I welcome the move upwards, and I believe that we will see schemes in this range that we would not have seen if we had not argued and convinced the Government of the need to include feed-in tariffs in the Bill. I congratulate the Government and, in particular, the Minister’s new department for seeing the light on this issue.