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Energy: Renewables (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

My Lords, that point is well taken and I will make sure that the agency is informed. I fully accept the points raised by the noble Lords, Lord Dixon-Smith and Lord Teverson, about heat and its potential, and the transport sector. All this provides challenges to the grid. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, raised a number of important points about the transmission access review. There is no doubt that the connection of a significant increase in renewable generation sets an unprecedented challenge for our electricity networks. We put a package of measures together in last year’s transmission access review, which will help inform the renewables energy strategy. On the question of offshore wind which, again, is a point well taken, the Department of Energy and Climate Change and Ofgem are leading a project to put a new regulatory regime in place. I understand entirely the points the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, raised. These are matters of very urgent debate. I am very happy again to feed his views in to that debate. I cannot really say more than that, but I am very well aware of the issues under discussion now. We had a very good discussion about the potential of nuclear energy. With the noble Lord, Lord Broers, we took part in a debate on these matters only three or four weeks ago. I echo his comments very much. We hope that the passage of the Planning, the Energy and the Climate Change Acts will allow a much more rational and, I hope, speedier path to making the decisions that have to be made. He is surely right about the contribution that engineers in particular and scientists in general can make. We are very committed to doing that. I again echo the point the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, made about the huge potential for young people, and not just young people, to go into the energy sector. There are an enormous number of jobs with great potential. One of the reasons we have to encourage young people to be interested in physics, chemistry, engineering subjects and maths subjects is because we have to grow people to go into these jobs, and we wish to do that. As regards the timetable for the national planning statements so that the Infrastructure Planning Commission can get on with its work, I am glad to say that we expect to publish draft national policy statements later this year for consultation. They will be subject to parliamentary scrutiny this autumn. We hope that they will be ready by spring 2010. We know that we need to get on with this. Coal of course has an important role to play. In relation to that, we believe that carbon capture and storage has great potential. That is why we are one of the first countries committed to supporting commercial scale demonstration and one of the first countries to put in place a national regulatory regime for the storage of carbon dioxide. This is a very important area for UK plc in terms of what we can do in this country, but also in terms of our export potential from what we learn from the pilot demonstration. This has been a very high-quality debate indeed and will be very helpful to the Government in terms of our renewable energy strategy. Noble Lords have raised a number of very important matters. I finish by saying that I am well aware that the 2020 targets for renewables are very tough. We face some critical decisions about energy in the short, medium and long term. The Department of Energy and Climate Change was created to enable government to do that. We are determined to do that. I again thank the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, for his marvellous opening speech tonight, for the excellence of the report that he and his committee have produced, and say how much I welcome the opportunity of further debate with noble Lords on matters that are of the utmost importance.