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Energy Bill

I recall having just mentioned the technical problems that we have had with advanced gas-cooled reactors and that that is why we changed to the technology that the French and Germans developed—the Sizewell technology—which has been proved to be more dependable. As I was saying, if we have that base load supply at night when people are not boiling kettles, we will have to think about how to deal with that. I read an interesting paper about developing a hydrogen economy. We already have motor cars that will run on hydrogen—BMW and other manufacturers have taken the lead on that. It would certainly be practical to use hydrogen that is generated by electrolysis at night, or by a process that the Americans are looking into of producing hydrogen directly in a reactor core—I get notes from the hon. Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed), who knows more about the nuclear industry than I do. It would be practical to pump hydrogen around the existing gas network—hydrogen is a little more porous than the current natural gas that we put in there—and have a hydrogen economy based on our existing gas network. That idea looks a little further ahead than even the Bill envisages, but we do not want to close the door to such ideas. I welcome the news from the Government about electric cars, and I am sure that even if there were a change of Government, that approach would not change. However, I think that some people are making claims that cannot be substantiated by research or data about how green electric cars are at the moment. I am not sure how green an electric car can be if it is being charged up using coal power, but it is important to allow the industry to develop electric cars because we will in due course have green electricity that they can use. Another issue to consider is smart metering and how car batteries can be used as a resource when they are on charge. We might be able to smooth out some of the peaks in supply and demand by using the resource of all those car batteries, when they are plugged into their chargers, to augment the grid at certain times. Recently, at Imperial college, London, I looked at some very interesting developments involving fuel cells for domestic use. There was a boiler that looked every bit like the kind of normal combi boiler that we would have in our flats and homes, but it was producing electricity using a fuel cell that used natural gas, and the waste heat that was being produced was not being wasted as it is in big power stations in south Yorkshire, where it goes up as waste heat through cooling towers, but was being used to heat domestic water for the house. I hope that we will see that interesting technology go forward.