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Energy: Renewables (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

My Lords, I add my compliments to the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, and the members and the staff of the Economic Affairs Committee on their report. Like the committee I will not try to tackle the question of the validity of global warming. But I would say, quite apart from that, that I feel that there are very serious matters—economic and environmental—that justify the investigation of alternative forms of energy in any case. This is a broad-ranging report that is realistic about the costs and difficulties that will be encountered if we are to meet our goals in implementing renewable energy generation. I think that the volume of evidence accompanying the report is in effect an encyclopaedia on energy matters which will be valuable for several years, especially as the committee made the wise decision to tackle the renewable generation of heat and transportation as well as electricity. As an engineer, it was also not only a pleasure but a relief to find within a report on a matter dominated by engineering that the recommendations were based largely on numbers rather than words and that there was recognition of the uncertainty and risk involved with many of the estimates. Finally, it was gratifying to find that the conclusions were largely in line with conclusions drawn by the majority of engineers with whom I have been in contact for many years. Five years ago, for example, the Royal Academy of Engineering—I declare my interest as president of the academy at that time—produced a report entitled The Cost of Generating Electricity which drew similar conclusions to this report, pointing out that the low-cost, low-carbon option was nuclear fission and that the cost of wind, wave, marine and biomass and especially offshore wind were high compared with the nuclear or fossil fuel options, and that this would mean that their adoption would be expensive to the consumer. The year before the academy report was published, I said in a Times interview that, "““government plans to generate 20 per cent of electricity from renewable sources by 2020 were unrealistic and investment in nuclear power was critical if shortages were to be avoided””." My statement and the conclusions of the academy report were strongly contested at the time by advisers to government, and regrettably it took them several years to change their minds and come up with a strategy that will in fact reduce carbon dioxide and at the same time keep the lights on. That brings me to the major point that I wish to take today—that we have to get on with this task without further delay and stop the endless debate, with one government report and consultation following another, all of which seem merely an excuse for procrastination. It is unfortunate that we have made some foolish decisions, such as the selling of Westinghouse, but we still have residual engineering expertise in most areas of power generation and we should as soon as possible specialise in selected areas and develop world-competitive industrial capabilities in renewable energy generation and of course in nuclear power. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, will address the subject of skills, as he has so constructively pursued this issue for many years. When it comes to timescales, there are some depressing statements in the report, such as paragraph 176, which says that the earliest a nuclear station could be built is 2017 to 2020. This conclusion was based on evidence given by the then Minister of State for Energy, Mr Malcolm Wicks, who said: "““The most optimistic scenario I have seen is that there possibly could be one””—" nuclear power plant— "““up and running by 2017 and then some others talk about 2018””. " However, he went on to say: "““I guess I am just being a little bit more cautious when I said 2020””." Why must this take so long? Why is it that we seem to take so much longer to complete projects than other countries? It does not seem to matter whether it is a runway at Heathrow that is going to take us twice as long to build as other countries take to build an entirely new airport or, in this instance, eight to 11 years to build a nuclear power station, when there are nuclear power stations available today. The report correctly emphasises the detrimental role that our planning processes play in achieving our aims on schedule, but falls short of recommending serious revision of these processes. If we are to survive as a vibrant world economy we are going to have to speed up. If the major delays are a result of our planning regulation, then let us be more ambitious in our reform of these regulations. We need dramatically to speed up the process, perhaps by the introduction of parallelism. Processes that again and again deliver too little too late almost guarantee that we will fall behind. Perhaps the Minister will be encouraging in his reply and tell us that the changes that are in the pipeline will in fact greatly reduce the time that it takes to complete the planning process. Rather than spending the majority of our time—let alone the mind-numbing sums of taxpayers’ money which make every sum mentioned in this report seem trivial—on propping up our ill-managed banks, we should rapidly launch some infrastructure projects that will secure the nation’s future. There are renewable energy projects of all sizes that would be appropriate, and future generations would thank us for pursuing them, rather than wondering with dismay how we stumbled into blackouts and failed to meet our goals for reducing carbon dioxide.