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Energy Security

I shall talk about nuclear later. I am pro-nuclear; I believe we need to get on with it. I think that one of the problems we face is that we now have a gap between the end of the planned life of our current fleet of nuclear power stations and the earliest possible date at which we can get new ones. That gap should not be there; we should have avoided creating it. The Secretary of State expresses a view with which we all agree—that we need increased capacity in our gas storage system. I was surprised by the wording of the Liberal amendment, which is alarmingly complacent. I hope that at least between those on the two Front Benches there will be agreement on the action that is now required to guarantee Britain's energy security, not least because that action involves long-term decisions. We should not seek to make short-term differences. Companies will make major investment decisions worth £200 billion and lasting 20, 30 or 40 years. We should aim for a long-term view of diversity and more robust sources of supply. British energy policy has been exposed as out of date. It was designed 25 years ago for a world in which Britain had an excess of generating capacity, where we enjoyed the security of growing North sea oil and gas production, and where concerns about local pollution and international climate change were not as intense as they are now. However, power plants get old, fossil fuel reserves dwindle away, and pollution builds up to crisis proportions. The Government have had ample warning on all those fronts. Power plant lifetimes are a matter of record. The Government knew that our existing fleet of power stations would need to be replaced. The peaking and decline of North sea production has long been predicted and was already under way at the beginning of the Government's first term, with obvious implications for dependence on fossil fuel imports. In their 1997 election manifesto, the Government promised a 20 per cent. cut in carbon emissions by 2010, thereby serving notice on themselves that a transition to cleaner sources of energy would be required. Despite the transformation some time ago of the basic assumptions underlying energy policy, the policy framework has remained fundamentally unchanged. A framework designed for an age of plenty is still with us in an age of insecurity. Sometimes Government are overtaken by events, but in respect of energy policy, the Government saw what was coming and did not do enough about it. Let me explain where that leaves us in terms of the main areas of energy use—first, electricity. Back in July the Department of Energy and Climate Change unveiled its energy plan for the coming decade. It is good that there is such a plan and it is perhaps the most important document that the Department has published to date, but it contained a dark secret. It revealed that Ministers were expecting blackouts across Britain in the years ahead. A chart in that document showed a big rise in what are called expected energy unserved, otherwise known as power cuts. From virtually no blackouts now, the Government said that they expected the level to rise to 3,000 MWh by 2017. That is the equivalent of three nuclear power stations shutting down at the same time, or to put it another way, 1 million people losing power for 15 minutes more than 20 times in the course of a year. Worse still, shortages would most likely strike at times of peak demand—that is, on the coldest winter evenings. The head of Ofgem warned us that the years following 2015 could be very cold indeed. [Interruption.] The Minister sometimes complains, as he is doing now from a sedentary position, that the chart is taken out of context and that we ought not to make use of it in this way. We have always been very careful to make its context clear. It is an official projection included in an official Government publication, freely available not just to the Opposition, but to anyone considering whether to invest in this country over the next 10 years. Let me turn to coal. Our power sector, in which I include coal, will certainly need investment. Anyone who believes in diversity, as I do, needs to look at fuel sources right across the range. It is worth noting that, in the course of the big freeze that we have had during over the past week, coal plant has at times supplied more than 40 per cent. of our electricity, helping to relieve pressure on gas supplies. The pressure on gas supplies would have been very much worse if we had been in the situation that we will arrive at in the next few years, when a third of our coal generating capacity is withdrawn.