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Energy: National Policy Statements

My Lords, like everybody else, I thank the Minister for his introduction to the debate and what he had to say. I welcome the report. The timetable of all this was set in the Planning Act 2008, and in the Climate Change Act on a roughly similar timescale. Of course, here we are in the dying days of a Parliament, with hopelessly inadequate time to consider these issues properly and seriously and in detail, and for amendments to be considered properly, and so on. What is the real scope for change if we really feel that change is necessary? I am bound to say that I find the documents themselves very interesting and helpful in many ways, but very inadequate in others. I wish that I did not feel that the Government were holding my back to the wall and saying, "You’ve got to pass these documents, because the state of national energy security for the future is such that we need to get on". The IPC is already in existence and waiting for applications. It cannot get applications because no applicant can make an application without these documents to guide him about the processes and the detail that he is required to supply. We have our backs against the wall. If I feel as though my back is against the wall, I have some sympathy for the Minister because I feel that his back is also against the wall because the reality is that we should have dealt with this subject five years ago when there would have been time to deal with it in detail and to take the process through. We no longer have that luxury. Welcome as this discussion is, I am a critic. We have known about this problem for many years. The life cycle of power stations is finite and known, and the Government have been reluctant to face this issue until now. The position is aggravated—if I can use that terminology—by the generally, although not unanimously, agreed concern over global warming. Despite what my noble friend Lord Reay said, the need to decarbonise the economy is still there. The current concern about the adequacy of some information does not threaten the central thesis that is driving the move to decarbonise society. No one has been able to challenge the core issue of the carbon dioxide proportion of the atmosphere. It is there, and the scientific consequences can be calculated. That is the background to this issue. What really bothers me about these papers is that, as so many noble Lords have said this afternoon, they consider only short-term issues. These are tactical documents. There is insufficient recognition of the strategy that will be required to reach 2050. Indeed, some of the decisions that might be taken as a consequence of these papers could prejudice the 2050 position, as has already been said. The lifetime of a modern power station is 40 years. A power station application now will take six or seven years, so any new power station constructed as a result of these new processes will be in existence after 2050. The Government have made much of the possibility of carbon capture and storage being a solution to the problem. They will require every new coal-fired power station to decarbonise only a certain proportion of its possible output. If you build a 600 megawatt station, only 350 megawatts will be required to be decarbonised. If the lifetime of that power station takes us beyond 2050, and it will, the whole of its output will be required to be decarbonised. There is the subsequent problem that most of the systems extract only 90 per cent of the carbon, not 100 per cent of it. There is possibly an even greater threat in going down the coal-fired power station route: the question of the cost of the process. I have managed to find only one written report on the possible cost of carbon capture and storage. This comes from the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, set up by the Prime Minister of Australia, which is backed by $100 million from the Australian Government. I quote from the statement I have here: ""the Global CCS Institute estimates even the cheapest version of the technology is unlikely to be viable for a commercial project before carbon dioxide emissions cost $60 a tonne"." That is an Australian unit of currency. ""The institute says CCS will increase electricity prices by up to 78 per cent"." I venture to suggest that almost all the other forms of alternative sustainable energy will be able to compete easily with that, so our reliance on carbon capture and storage may be rather risky. That deals with that particular issue. I have three other questions that need to be answered by the Minister. The first concerns the relationship between energy planning decisions and the effects of the EU environmental directives. At present we have an instance of this in the nuclear power stations paper where the Dungeness power station, which already exists, is rejected as a site for further power stations because of the possible environmental consequences of taking over more of a particularly significant beach area. We need to be a bit clearer in our thinking. If we fail in our efforts to decarbonise and the failure is global, and if the sea levels rise and the environment changes, as it certainly will—you can see the changing environment every spring now in this country; things that normally would flower in the middle of May are now flowering at the end of April, birds are nesting earlier and so on, so we know that the climate is different; and I am a farmer and I have lived with nature all my life—