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Green Energy (Definition and Promotion) Bill

My third point is about definitions. We had a debate on Second Reading about the phrase "green jobs", which was in the original Bill. The Government were all over the place on that definition at the time. The Prime Minister was promoting green jobs from the Front Bench, but one of his ministerial colleagues said in a parliamentary answer that there was no such thing as a green job, because all jobs were green jobs, so it is probably good that the attempt to define a green job has disappeared from the Bill. My colleagues and I hope that more and more jobs will be genuinely green jobs that provide sustainable solutions to our economic and ecological crisis, but any attempt to limit and circumscribe that definition to certain things to do with the energy industry is probably inappropriate. The definition that remains in the Bill of "green energy" is not as controversial. Clause 1(1) states:""The principal purpose of this Act is to promote green energy."" We all know what we mean by that—at least, we think we do—but the Bill defines it more specifically. We had two small debates about this point in Committee. The Bill defines it as""the generation of electricity or heat"—" the word "heat" was a welcome addition in Committee—""from renewable or low-carbon sources"." It also contains a capacity limit of 5 MW for electricity and 5 MW thermal for heat. I am happy with that definition for the purposes of the Bill, but I would not want to think that that would be the final word on the definition of green energy. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham made the point in Committee that some of us do not think that nuclear energy is the green energy that others may think it is. Energy produced in such a hugely complicated and technological way is not green energy. I do not want to open the Pandora's box of that debate, but I make the point that the definition in the Bill works well. We are talking about small schemes in this instance, but I hope that when we have other debates on strategy for energy policy generally we can look at what we mean by green energy and reach common agreement.