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Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I shall speak to Amendment 60A, which is grouped with this amendment. With this modestly titled clause, ““Certain consents under Electricity Act 1989””, we move into the area of marine renewables, which is one of the most important issues we shall be addressing in the Bill. I regret that the clause is so modestly titled even if it is for bureaucratic reasons. We need to debate, first, as the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, outlined, the definition of the relationship between the IPC and the MMO. The Joint Committee was clear on that issue and recommended that the Government should revisit the dual body regulatory infrastructure for offshore energy installations because it recognised that the current situation is unsatisfactory. The Government have sought to define the relationship by virtue of size—I shall come on to what that means in a moment—but given that the Minister said on the first day in Committee that the MMO was to be the handler and resolver of tensions, to give it the role of statutory adviser to the IPC, as my noble friend suggests in Amendment 71, would be the right relationship. The IPC would then surely be in the planning seat for infrastructure projects and the MMO would have to balance many other issues. I am looking forward to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Coity, because, in the context of what the Minister said, it will be particularly interesting to consider whether the MMO should have the power of veto. On the question of whether the MMO should be able to approve or not approve a generating station, the Government have decided on 100 megawatts of generation as an understandable splitting point. The difficulty with that can be exemplified by the evidence given to the Joint Committee by Mr Carcas on behalf of Pelamis Wave Power. It is particularly appropriate that the British Wind Energy Association has an exhibition in the atrium at the moment which exemplifies the different kinds of marine energy—tidal energy, wave energy and so on. Mr Carcas’s evidence on behalf of Pelamis, at page 94 of Volume II of the evidence, was that wave energy, "““is essentially stored concentrated wind energy … we occupy about four to five times less area for an equivalent rated project compared to offshore wind””." That is important in this context because it might be more appropriate to have a definition based on the size of the sea area taken than on the amount of energy generated. It might be much more difficult for shipping, navigation, marine conservation areas and so on to define a generating plant by the amount of power generated than by the area of sea it occupies. The Government have taken an easy definition at the moment but I am not sure that it is the most appropriate one. We need to debate the issue fully. The amendment also suggests that the inclusion of an extension is a difficult concept. A generating station may consist of one element—for example, a wave machine—but it may be connected to other generating stations through a collecting station. The wave hub off Cornwell, for example, is the collecting station for many generating stations. How does that sit with the definition? Is each generating station a separate, small consideration that can come under the MMO, or do they all get added together? I shall be interested in the Minister’s definition of ““extension””. How many extensions can there be before their development becomes a nationally significant infrastructure project? There are many issues to debate. We must also debate at greater length the land-sea interface because the Bill does not satisfactorily consider the relationship between a large generating station at sea and the effect it may have on land. The Government created the IPC partly in reaction to the fact that the operation of the Thames Estuary wind farm was held up because the onshore transmission station could not be constructed as the local district council had objected to it for rather too long. The land-sea interface is important. What role will the IPC have as the projects come onto land and what role will the local authority play in resolving what can sometimes be rather large planning issues? As another example, we are looking at the Atlantic array wind farm in the Bristol Channel, just north of Lundy, which will have requirements with big knock-on effects. On land, it will need construction bases, all sorts of service areas and so on. Surely, those will need to be resolved by the local council, not by the IPC. At the moment the Bill leaves those questions rather unresolved.