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Green Energy (Definition and Promotion) Bill

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. In a moment, I shall come to my own experience of the German perspective, having also been to look carefully at what the Germans are doing. My final point on ROCs is that the Government have been rather obsessed with wind power as the means of meeting their renewables targets over the last few years. That is partly because ROCs are suitable for that purpose, although I am glad that some variation has been introduced to the proportion of ROCs available in relation to power from different sources. I hope that the introduction of the feed-in tariff and microgeneration will enable us much more effectively to spread the sources of renewable energy and not depend so much on very large wind farms, which, as several hon. Members have said and as you and I are both aware, Mr. Deputy Speaker, cause immense local resistance, not least because they are often seen as huge blots on the landscape. I want to discuss what I have seen happening in Germany, especially vis-à-vis anaerobic digestion. As a number of hon. Members have said, virtually anything can be anaerobically digested—livestock manures, slurries, sewage sludge and, of course, food wastes. To return to the point about money, so much of what is done—the composting, which is virtually the only system on any scale that is getting rid of organic, putrescible waste—is viable for the compost operator only because of effective subsidy, either through landfill tax or whatever is coming back into the system. If we want renewable power to be not only an important part of our climate change policy but accepted by the community as important, the sooner we can move it away from a form of subsidy, the better, although I am not suggesting that it may be impossible to achieve this without any form of cross-subsidy, as we get through ROCs. I fear that, in financial and economic terms, some of the developments of the past few years, which may be a necessary staging post, are not sustainable because they rely too much on some form of cross-subsidy from either ROCs, the landfill tax or elsewhere. Hon. Members have mentioned the fact that biogas can be fed, through the necessary filters, directly into the gas network. That is right, but it will work properly only if we have some sort of feed-in tariff that suits it. I want to stress in particular the point about agricultural waste. Those who know me will not be surprised that I have returned to the issue; my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson) referred to it briefly. In the last few months, the Government have introduced some highly restrictive measures on livestock farmers as a result of the nitrates directive. I shall not go into the rights and wrongs of that, but it means that farmers face huge investment costs in relation to storing and dealing with waste. The time scale does not synchronise here, because farmers have to act within the next year, but if these two things could have been brought together with a little more cross-Government thinking, a lot of that investment could have been not in storage systems, but in biodigesters, enabling animal waste to be used to create a worthwhile resource in the form of biogas. Biogas and the digestion of such materials create a useful digestate, which rightly can be fed on to the land. It is neutral in many ways, but it is a valuable source of nutrients—and that at a time when agricultural fertiliser costs have been rising dramatically, setting aside the issue of the sustainability of continuing to use fertilisers whose manufacture is itself often highly energy inefficient. As others have said, and as National Grid suggests, biogas could generate perhaps 18 per cent. of total UK gas demand. More importantly, it could prevent up to 75 per cent. of methane emissions from current manure management practices. As the hon. Member for Nottingham, South said, that is already happening commonly not just in Germany, but in many of the northern countries of mainland Europe. It is based on a feed-in tariff-type system, which was generated not only as a means to meet renewables targets, but as part of Germany's search for greater domestic energy security. As the hon. Gentleman also said, Germany is much less dependent on the vagaries of the world gas markets. That, too, is an extremely important measure and one reason Germany is probably two decades ahead of this country in this. In Germany, there are 3,000 anaerobic digestion plants. The National Farmers Union estimates that this country could have up to 1,000, but there are fewer than 20. There are other bureaucratic obstacles. I have mentioned the issues of planning and the current lack of a feed-in tariff, which are important, but there is a third issue, which was touched on earlier. We need to find some way of incentivising—or forcing if incentives will not work—the companies that operate the electricity national grid and gas networks to be receptive to feed-in by microgeneration plants, whether it is electricity or gas. That is a huge challenge that I do not underestimate, but nothing else will work if we do not have that. It is part of the joined-up approach that is needed. I strongly support this measure and I pay huge tribute to everything that my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey has done. I entirely endorse what Members have said about the huge step forward, which I think my hon. Friend underplayed, that the Bill represents. However, it cannot make that step on its own. As I said, unless the connections—the rules, protocols and so on—enable the installation of such systems, it cannot work. That is a challenge for the Government. There is consensus across the House, as has been said, about the need to promote microgeneration and renewable energy. I hope that, on that basis of consensus and understanding, the Government will not only welcome this Bill but do everything they can to bring it into force as soon as possible—unlike with some of the measures we heard about earlier—and do their bit to encourage and enable anyone who wants to invest in such a system to put their electricity or gas straight into the grid, so that the full benefit from the system can be gained.