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

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friends and others for their contributions today and on the other days of debate on the national policy statements. They have raised very interesting points and some extremely important concerns. My noble friend Lord Crickhowell talked of LNG imports and safety. He was, as he said, a director of Associated British Ports. I was deputy chairman of the Port of London Authority, so I share some of his worries. The LNG tanker terminals present a special danger and the document seems to be inadequate on safety provision in that area. Perhaps the Minister will be able to guide us. I should like to probe the Minister further on responsibility for the planning decisions around the four parts of the energy sector that we have been discussing. I raise my concern that passing ultimate responsibility for saying yes or no to major investment decisions to the IPC would lead to legal challenges. I said that earlier this week. These four NPSs show the possibility of the other danger—that necessary projects would fail to get the go-ahead at all. The Minister made it sound as if the IPC will find it easy after these NPSs come into effect to assess whether an individual application should be accepted. On reading the fine print, it is clear that this is not the case. The relative importance of so many of the conditions in these documents remains unassessed. The IPC must weigh up the costs and benefits of each project, with the importance of a green energy sector on one hand, and local concerns and environmental impact on the other. We heard more on this from my noble friends Lord Jenkin and Lord Reay. Is the IPC also to decide how important each of those conditions is? Since we are so far off meeting the 2050 target, can we expect to see almost all low-carbon investment gaining consent in the immediate future, with local considerations only regaining their importance as an 80 per cent cut in emissions becomes a little less out of reach? Or is the IPC to guess at the future rate of applications and technological development, and award consent on a more consistent scale for the next 30 years? I am afraid that I am going to chide the Minister a little more about the length of time that it has taken to get the Government to commit fully to an important feature of the low-carbon economy. Carbon capture and storage is still a developing technology, but it will undoubtedly play a critical role in allowing fossil fuel-based power stations to continue to play a part in our energy sector, while ameliorating their carbon footprint. The Government have finally brought forward some of the powers for which we have been calling on CCS in the Energy Bill, which was recently laid in the House, but we have heard nothing about issues such as the pipelines that will be needed to transport the carbon dioxide. Can the associated infrastructure be provided under this statement, or will there be a further policy statement that handles the issues that are peculiar to that grid? My concern about there being sufficient detail for the infrastructure decisions extends to the electricity network. Disparities are already appearing between the connections for which designated zones are receiving consent and the capacity that they are equal to producing. Although the Government have finally put to bed many of the objections to offshore wind power, they have still not taken seriously the need for reliable and cheap access to the national grid. I am sure the Minister will agree that having a target of 33 gigawatts of offshore generation would be meaningless without a means of feeding that capacity into the grid. Has he considered the Conservative policy of altering the regulatory regime to ensure that readily accessible under-sea direct current cables on the east and west coasts are put in place? In other areas, too, the Government have shown themselves to be unwilling to face up to the obstacles that successful applications will have to overcome. In gas storage, inadequate planning guidance has been only one of the problems, albeit a massive one. The Government have continued to reject Conservative proposals for a minimum requirement of gas supplies to be available for suppliers of gas to domestic and business users and generators of gas, which would have signalled to investors that there is demand for greater gas storage, the growth of which has been sluggish until now as a result of both planning constraints and the huge levels of funding that will be required. The Government are also resistant to other important policies on the creation of a genuine smart grid, where consumers can save money through a combination of informed energy usage and improved competition on energy tariffs. Obviously, a critical feature of such a smart grid is the successful rollout of smart meters to every home. We might have persuaded the Government to extend their support for smart meters beyond only commercial use more than a year ago, but we still have to hear much about the detail of how they see the rollout working. The Government seem to have decided that the rollout will be handled by suppliers. Does the Minister envisage the district network operators having a role as well? Surely their engagement will be necessary to manage the load on the local grid. I finish today, after these long debates, more in sorrow than in anger. The Government are passing the buck to the IPC. All this should have been done a long time ago. Time has now run out, and I am afraid that it will be for the next Government to carry this work forward and to show some much-needed leadership.