---

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

My Lords, we come to the last of these debates, although we have been reminded that a similar subject will be debated on Monday. I am sure that we will all come back and go through some of the same arguments. I intend not to spend a great deal of time summing up from these Benches—or rather, from this side of the Grand Committee. However, I will set out a certain context. The House is on all sides committed to the need to decarbonise our economy. We as a House, and Parliament as a whole, passed overwhelmingly the Climate Change Act, which set the target of reducing our 1990 carbon emissions—not our current ones—by 80 per cent by 2050. To achieve that, we have to get on with it, and I am sure that not one person in this room would want to start where we are. But we are where we are, and therefore we have to move forward towards the target as quickly as we can. That means using a combination of technologies that are well represented in these energy planning statements. Some may find that the answer for our economy lies completely in nuclear power generation, while others would disagree and argue for a much broader mix. We on these Benches are great advocates of renewable sources, but I agree that wind power can make up only a proportion of our total energy generation. That is why it is important to bring on the other renewable technologies as quickly as possible. There are difficulties with all of them, including nuclear in terms of cost, so the dilemma for me is not so much the countryside. I would say that prairification of the land in the 1970s and 1980s has probably been more destructive of biodiversity in the English countryside than a few wind turbines. I can see some of them from my house, but prairification and other impacts have been far greater. The bigger problem, as many other speakers have mentioned during the debate, is how to square the circle of meeting the cost without creating more fuel poverty. It is a great challenge and I have no easy answers. I shall refer to the individual documents. On fossil fuel, I would have preferred there to be an emissions performance standard. We will not have a chance to talk about that in any depth during the passage of the Energy Bill because it is almost certain that it will not reach Committee. I have a feeling that that might be the Conservative position as well, but I would have liked to see carbon capture and storage for new coal-fired power stations of all capacities rather than just those producing more than 300 megawatts. On the view of CCS taken by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, I do not think that it is any way a dream. All the technology is there. It is just a question of making it work at an affordable cost, or at least not unaffordable in comparison with the other technologies, within a reasonable timescale. The Liberal Democrats are strongly in favour of CCS, but I agree that in a way we are hanging on to it as a sort of comfort blanket. If everything else does not work, then at least we can carry on with fossil fuels and somehow get rid of the carbon. It is an essential technology so we certainly back the programmes. We think that they have been slow and faltering, but they are needed. In terms of carbon capture readiness—we are getting used to such phrases from our high-definition television sets—who will decide when readiness should become actual? When the technology is in place, who will press the button so that the empty spaces beside our power stations are filled and investment starts up? Connected to carbon capture readiness is biomass. What I found strange in the document, and which I think might have something to do with the large combustion plant directive, is that biomass plants will have to meet the same conditions for carbon capture readiness. I do not understand that. I do not know whether it is due to fall-out from some ancient EU legislation. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, that I opposed shed-loads of EU legislation while I was an MEP. That legislation is as good or as bad as ours or that of any other Parliament. As for the sustainability arguments, if you are burning biomass, you are recycling CO2. Therefore, if you have a carbon capture and storage requirement with it, you are placing it in double jeopardy, which does not make sense from a scientific point of view. How does the provision work with co-firing, because co-firing with biomass is good in terms of the atmosphere and carbon emissions? Would any co-firing plants benefit from the carbon capture and storage requirements—as they should in theory? That is an important point. The provision is very narrow for renewables technologies. That is understandable, given where the Government are at the moment. I hope very much that other technologies will come forward very quickly. I was amused by some of the detail and generalities of the statement. Paragraph 2.7.7 of the statement says, at page 56: ""The predicted wind resource will be a key consideration for the applicant in identifying a potential site"." If the planning permission has to remind the commercial operator of that, frankly we should say no from the start. Paragraph 2.7.11 of the statement says, at page 57: ""The connection of the proposed onshore wind farm into the relevant electricity network will be an important consideration"." If it is more than 30 megawatts, I guess that is likely to be the case. But there we are, I guess that the provision had to be filled up with something. I come to something more challenging, and I should be interested to know whether the department has looked at this. I should think there would be scope for regulatory arbitrage in this area. Onshore wind farms can go through a difficult local planning process, involving possible planning appeals. It is a testing process. In fact, it is part of the Government’s justification for the IPC. The document refers to turbines of 2 to 3.5 megawatts. Is there not therefore a great incentive for developers to go for large sites with large generators, thereby avoiding the traditional local authority route? Therefore, becomes more feasible to have large wind farms. Have the Government carried out an analysis of this factor? Do they think that there will be a move towards larger sites to avoid local authority accountability? I completely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Young, about the sustainability criteria with regard to biomass. That needs to be taken into consideration. In fact, for a moment, I thought that it was, given that paragraph 2.5.24, on page 11 states: ""Biomass or waste combustion plants are likely to generate considerable transport movements. For example, a biomass or waste combustion plant that uses 500,000 tonnes of fuel per annum (tpa) might generate a minimum of 200 heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) movements per day importing the fuel. There will also be residues which will need to be transported off site regularly. Therefore, any application should incorporate suitable access leading off from the main highway network"." That is utterly obvious, but no sustainability argument is put forward. However, we must move away from the food miles-type argument. I have been involved in the freight industry for most of my career. I was mainly involved in land freight transport, but, like it or not, ship transport across oceans is amazingly efficient in terms of carbon emissions. It is often efficient in price as well. Probably—I do not know absolutely—the carbon emissions from taking a tonne of timber from a Canadian port to a British port are far less than when taking it from, say, Liverpool to Manchester. It is certainly cheaper. That is the way these things are. We have to be sophisticated in that analysis, although I am the last person who would suggest that we should fill the oceans with ships full of biomass. On pipelines—a point brought up very strongly by the noble Lords, Lord Crickhowell and Lord Jenkin—it is slightly ironic that the policy relates only to oil and gas, and does not include CO2 pipelines. The transport side of that is important, too. I know that energy networks are not covered by this policy document, but the real challenge is that we have to make them far smarter and broader in terms of long distance, whereby matters such as intermittency, which is certainly an issue, are less important through the use of smart grids and wider grids. Finally, this debate has been, contrary to my initial expectations, a very good process in holding the Government to account, particularly given the contributions from Members such as the noble Lords, Lord Crickhowell and Lord Jenkin and others—and even the two noble Lords behind me.