---

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

With permission, I should like to speak briefly in the gap. In the debate on EN-1, I asked the Minister if he could guide me to any detailed cost and feasibility analyses that the Government had commissioned that would help me, as an engineer, to understand how they had arrived at the mix of low-carbon technologies that they had chosen. Since then, I have looked at the Redpoint Trilemma report referred to in EN-1 and EN-8. This contains overall capital and other costs for the various alternatives, and it is presumably on the basis of these numbers that the proposals from the Government have emerged. It is here that one also finds how the ROCs will in effect pay for any excessive costs that emerge. However, the report still does not contain detailed numerical analyses that allow an engineer to decide whether the overall capital and other costs that are taken as the starting point are correct. I suspect that this is where the error lies that, if corrected, would bring the Government to the same conclusions that have been reached by the noble Lords, Lord Turnbull, Lord Jenkin, Lord Reay, and many others, and which I share, namely that offshore wind is too expensive to be used to play such a major role in our energy mix. Of course it is appropriate to use offshore wind, but not to the extent that is planned—it is just too expensive. I raise the issue again to make the point that the Government could have avoided these problems if they had been more transparent in the way that they came to their conclusions, and if they had used more expert advice and turned to engineering institutions such as the Royal Academy of Engineering. Of course, I declare my interest as a past president of that academy.