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Energy: Renewables (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

My Lords, it is a pleasure to express my gratitude both to the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, for his wonderful summing-up of this report and, indeed, to all the members of the Select Committee on Economic Affairs. I would like to express a slightly different reaction from most others, because I feel great sympathy for everybody involved in this report. The report is directed largely at the 2020 situation, and inevitably at the electricity generation problem, because that is the one immediately to hand. However, that is essentially a tactical issue; when this report was being written nobody was thinking about our strategic target, which had not been defined. The Government had an aspiration for 2050, but we now have a Climate Change Committee, a Climate Change Act and a target. That target is not particularly directed at the electricity generating industry but at the whole economy, and will undoubtedly have a huge general effect on industry. Of course, it must include road transport—indeed, all transport—and take in the whole heating sector, and so on. That will require a very different approach from the one the committee inevitably had to work towards in this report. I do not remember much about my military career, but one of the fundamentals of life was that you always had to have a clear strategy before trying to work out what your tactics were, which is the reason for my sympathy. That said, the report contains a great deal of useful information. I have picked up on one immediate figure from page 12 of the report, which illustrates energy flows in the United Kingdom. I have never seen them set out quite as clearly and admirably before, and it enables me to direct one point straight at the Minister. At the bottom of that figure is a wonderful amount of energy: "““Lost in power stations & network, used by the energy industry””." Most of that is waste heat: I sometimes think that we in this Palace produce a great deal of that, but most of ours is not recoverable while most of that ought to be. I have touched on this subject before, but we are doing absolutely nothing to try to sort out our energy problems if we do not sort that one out. If we finish up with nuclear power stations surrounded by acres of glass, or something like that, because horticulture is the only use that people can find for that heat—it is not easy to convey heat to conurbations from coastal areas—so be it. However, we need to recognise the implications of what we are about, and we need a totally different public attitude because the problems that we face are, despite what my noble friend Lord Lawson says, very great. It will take a major effort, and I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who was echoed by the noble Lord, Lord Broers, and others. Up until now, the approach has been both inadequate and really unsatisfactory. That said, although this is no excuse for the Government, there has been a reason for prevarication in that there has been no clear strategic ambition, without which it has been extremely difficult to deal with these issues. I would like to repeat something that was said to me more than a decade ago by the noble Lord, Lord Flowers, who, sadly, nowadays we see rather less in his place than we used to. We served together on the Science and Technology Committee, and one day he remarked to me that mankind only has one source of energy, which is nuclear, but we had a choice. The choice was between having a nuclear power station here and having one 98 million miles away. It was a long time before I had worked out the implications of what he said, but one of them is clearly that all of the fossil fuels we use are in fact a form of solar energy, stored over geological time. The process that produced those fuels locked underground large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, producing the atmosphere that enabled mankind eventually to develop. Today, we are happily pouring that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere again, and whether we produce conditions where we can continue to survive remains to be seen, yet changes are going on despite what my noble friend Lord Lawson says. The polar ice caps, both Arctic and Antarctic, are retreating. Glaciers in places such as the Alps and the Himalayas are retreating. The salinity of the ocean around the Antarctic is changing, so plankton populations are diminishing. We do not know what effect these changes will have, and my noble friend may well argue that they are random, will have no long-term effect and may be reversed.