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Draft National Policy Statement for Fossil Fuel Electricity Generating Infrastructure (EN-2)

Well, I have been disappointed even more quickly than I had hoped. The Government should follow the example of the rule now adopted in Scotland, the so-called "Scottish national heritage standard", and recommend that no wind turbine should be sited closer than two kilometres from any dwelling. That would result in the saving of a very great deal of effort and expense by preventing many of these developments in inappropriate places being put forward in the first instance. Notwithstanding what the Minister has just said, will the Government please consider that for adoption as instruction or advice both for local authorities and for the IPC? The Government are doing their level best to ruin the landscape, one of this country’s most famous resources. Happily, they are running into heroic resistance. But now even the lowlands of England are threatened, since the latest turbines are so tall that they do not even need the support of a hill in order to catch the wind. During our debate here on Tuesday, the hope was expressed by some that the people of Scotland might at the general election show their opposition to the SNP’s anti-nuclear policy by voting it out at the next election. They could also use it as a chance to express their opposition to the SNP’s renewable energy policy. It is a tragedy how the Scottish Government have encouraged the disfigurement of that incomparably beautiful part of the United Kingdom with gigantic wind farms and grid lines such as the Inverness to Glasgow line, the so-called Beauly-Denny line, which was finally approved recently after six years of opposition and will run down through the heart of Scotland. It is an additional disadvantage of wind farms that, sited as they are on hilltops in scenic areas far from where the electricity they generate is required, they need hundreds of miles of new or strengthened transmission lines, which have to have the capacity to carry a full load of wind power even though they will very rarely be required to do so. I wish the NPS on the grid, EN-5, had something more to say on the subject of need, as the nuclear NPS does, although I took the noble Lord’s point that EN-1 covered that and that he did not want to duplicate what has been said. But did not EN-1 say much about the amount of transmission lines that would be required to meet the Government’s energy targets? Can the Minister throw more light on that, both in terms of the cost of this extra grid and in terms of extra mileage? How much would be due to wind and how much to nuclear? Perhaps the Minister will at least give us an estimate of the total expenditure required for the extension of the grid. While on the subject of EN-5, I should like for a moment to refer to what is described as "undergrounding" —which is a new verb to me. Paragraph 2.7.7 on page 11 states: ""The IPC should take into account that the cost of undergrounding electricity cables is between ten and twenty times as much per unit length as for an overhead line, depending on whether the line is buried directly in open agricultural land and the higher figure where more complex tunnelling and civil engineering through conurbations and major cities is required"." Obviously here the Government want to discourage the IPC from requiring cables to be laid underground, but how much better would it have been if the Government had spent a small fraction of the money they have wasted on wind power on ensuring that the small number of additional transmission lines that we actually need for our energy security had been laid underground, as well as undertaking a programme of putting underground existing lines that are particularly offensive in the landscape in where they are set. The Government could easily have been advised by some existing quango on where the priorities lay. Let us not ignore the fact that a large amount of cabling is laid underground through urban and suburban areas. I would have liked EN-4 to have said something more on the need for gas storage. What are the Government aiming for? Do they have any target in this area, or are targets for renewables only? Do they want to bring the amount of gas storage in this country up to the European average, when expressed as a percentage of the annual consumption, which I believe is about 13 per cent, as opposed to our current 4 per cent? As gas plays an ever-increasing role in our energy mix, with an ever-increasing percentage of that being imported, it is important to know what is in the Government’s mind. EN-2 deals with carbon capture and storage, of which we have heard much this afternoon and will hear more in the House on 23 March when we debate the Second Reading of the Energy Bill. It is an unproven technology, at least on the scale and form required. Even the Government do not expect it to be commercially available for 10 years. Meanwhile, to fund its research, £9.5 billion over 10 years is to be added to electricity consumers’ bills. Coal has to stay in the ground while we import more gas. Another way has been found to sacrifice energy security on the green altar. All the NPSs contain the obligatory section on climate change. EN-2 states that as fossil fuel generating stations are likely to be proposed for coastal or estuary sites—presumably due to the need for cooling water—applicants for development permission should show how their proposal would be resilient to both storm surges and, ""increased risk of drought leading to a lack of available cooling water"." How is the poor IPC to deal with that? At one moment there will be too much water, at the next it will all have disappeared. For its own sanity, I hope that the IPC will not believe a word of it. I come back to the subject of renewables. EN-3 deals with biomass as well as wind. I have a question relating to the importation of biomass material. The principal official justification for using biomass is that it saves on carbon emissions because the fuel used is immediately replaced with some new planted crop or forest. Is there a measure to ensure that that is the case with imported biomass and that the replanting takes place? If a power station is to be fed with shipload after shipload of timber crossing the Atlantic from Canada, and with lorry load after lorry load from the port to the power station, are the emissions produced by these journeys brought into the equation? If not, surely they should be? Perhaps the IPC could usefully assess this when considering applications. I conclude by returning to the subject with which I began: wind power. The damage that wind power has been allowed to do to the world-famous landscape of this country is truly a national scandal, but the damage done by the Government’s absurd infatuation with wind power goes far wider than simply destroying the landscape. Here I take up the points made by my noble friend Lord Jenkin. It has been calculated that the United Kingdom would need to invest only some £30 billion to £40 billion—enough in all conscience—in new power generation to secure future energy supplies, were it not for the Government’s targets that result in that figure leaping to some £200 billion because of the supposed need for wind-generated power, which is achievable only with enormous subsidy and entirely fitfully, as my noble friend Lord Jenkin has demonstrated. As I began to write this speech on Tuesday at around 10 pm, I checked on that useful website that tells us at any given moment the contribution to the grid of energy from different generating sources. The contribution from wind at that moment was given as 10 megawatts, or 0 per cent. The figure for the past 24 hours at that point was also given as 0 per cent. I have checked it several times since, and it never rose above 0.2 per cent until 8.30 this morning when the figure was 0.6 per cent, dragging the 24-hour contribution up to 0.2 per cent. Apart from illustrating the variability of the wind’s contribution to which all other sources of energy must adapt—easy enough at this low output, but incomparably harder if the targets for wind that are entertained by the Government were ever to be reached, as my noble friend Lord Jenkin explained—these figures hardly encourage us to believe that the Government will achieve 25 per cent of electricity from wind power by 2020. The pursuit of the Government’s fanciful wind power targets threaten to cripple the consumer and the country. I draw noble Lords’ attention to the fact that the extension of the ROC subsidy system, which the Government introduced, has to come into effect by 1 April, and that the implementing order is due to be debated and passed by the Grand Committee in this House next Monday. Perhaps noble Lords will find that they have something to do next week. The total cost estimate for the consumer that is attached to that order for the years up to 2030 amounts to the breathtaking sum of just short of £50 billion. It is extraordinary that the Government seem to operate in such a way that one hand does not know what the other hand is doing. The figures that were published this week revealed a rather shocking decline in the January trade balance, and a similar decline in manufacturing output in January, but that is nothing like what we will see in the future as industry is driven offshore to escape the deliberate and constant ratcheting-up of electricity prices to meet unattainable renewable energy targets. The Government are happy to boast that they have now attracted overseas turbine manufacturers to set up in the north-east, but what number of those jobs will be in the balance when weighed against the jobs that are lost throughout industry as a result of the rising cost of energy? Wind is surely blowing us on a journey to nowhere.