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Energy Bill

My Lords, coming in to bat at the end of a long batting order, one makes a list of all the points one expects to hear and ticks them off and then waits to see whether there is anything left to speak about when one’s innings comes. There are four things worth saying and I hope they are all of a practical nature. First, I declare that I have no interests in this area. It is important to say that in the modern climate so that there can be no misinterpretation that anything I say relates to any company with which I might have a relationship. On the issue of wind, I was a member of the European Union Sub-Committee B on renewable energy, which recommended that wind power would be the answer to the 2020 target. When the committee made a recommendation some 18 months ago, we assumed that there would be a very positive and swift reaction by the Government to supply the wind answer. We know that there are some five wind farms in which they are engaged at the moment, to a greater or lesser extent, but that will not nearly satisfy the 2020 target for two very good reasons. They have not done anything about setting up a supply chain for the things that they need to stick in the sea. At the moment it still takes about nine weeks to put up a single turbine and costs about £2 million to do so. We suggested that they needed 3,200 to cover the distance from Lowestoft to just north of Aberdeen, and they are building five farms at the moment. Now we see, as we heard in Grand Committee, that the Prime Minister wants to spend £75 billion on wind. If he wanted to do that, he would have to think in terms of extending the line from Lowestoft all the way round the south coast, up the north coast of Cornwall and Devon, way up beyond Blackpool to the Scottish border, because he would not be able to use the deep water or the cliffs which are shielded from wind, and he would have to leave the harbours and the rivers free and open to allow for the normal passage of shipping, so he would have a very poor return for his money. But he could do an awful lot with a very small fraction of the £75 billion that he has talked of. I do not even know that he has got £75 billion at the moment. I would be extremely surprised to hear that he had. When we produced that report we thought that £19 billion would buy 3,400 turbines on the east coast if they were put up at that time. It would have been more sensible had the Government at that time looked at their supply chain and realised that they did not have one. For putting up one pylon, you need at least one jack-up boat, which has to have a crane height of 75 metres, a lifting capacity of 72 tonnes, and a hammer capacity of 47,000 pounds a square inch. Just think about that for a moment. That then has to hammer each foundation into the seabed with a tolerance of half a centimetre for the accuracy with which the thing is lined up to be put in the fixing ring which has been put down there first, while it is held by two very brave marine divers. The Royal Marine divers are the best in the world. I remember saying to one of them once, "Aren’t you frightened down there when you have to hold these things straight while the hammer hits at 47,000 pounds?" "No, governor, of course not, it is no worse than the effect we have on any girl we stand next to, is it?" Very modest and charming people, the Marines. As it stands, we have not got one jack-up boat available to or operating for the Government. When we made the report there was one available which they could have had, but they missed their opportunity. Every jack-up boat in Europe is now booked out solidly for nearly four years ahead, at a cost of $160,000 dollars a day. We do not have one. Instead of spending £75 billion on a pipedream, why did the Government not take £1 million, go to Korea and buy four jack-up boats for about $240,000 each, and we would have had four that would at least have given us a chance of doing it? And what about the gearboxes? You cannot buy them. The only gearbox available in Europe comes from Siemens, and very unsportingly it will not supply any because it has presold its entire output for the next four years. One would have expected that the Department of Trade and Industry, or whatever we call it these days, would have done something about going out into the world and finding somebody who could get a licence to manufacture them and bring some industry to Britain. It would have been a very good macroeconomic thing to do. China and India both have excellent gearboxes for which we could probably have got a licence, but no one has moved to get a licence which could be installed in one of the British companies that could do it. So we have lost out on that too and have no supply chain. Forget wind. What else is there that we can do? Fortunately, there is a salvation, and your Lordships have tiptoed round it all evening without actually getting to it. The answer is certainly carbon capture and storage, but not on a post-combustion basis. It is on a pre-combustion basis; and that is the promised land. It is three times more effective at carbon capture than post-combustion, and it has another huge benefit, in that you can link it to a cleaning process to clean petrol at the same time, and you can drive all the carbon out of oil, by the same process, by simply flowing the extracted carbon from the coal straight through the oil. You get an enormous amount of carbon capture very cheaply. The Government would be at a huge advantage if they thought constructively about this. I once put this suggestion to the Minister, who said the Treasury would never wear it. If that is the case, the Treasury is even dafter than we thought, because it could give a tax credit for each tonne of coal that is washed. This would be almost exactly equal to the cost of cleaning a tonne of coal. It would have a zero sum budget to produce a vast amount of clean coal from the whole process, and an enormous amount of clean oil to go with it, that would put back into production an immense amount of the high-carbon-content oil that is left in the North Sea and which people now think is not effective. We have the way to big solutions. One American operation has set this up in an absolutely brilliant form at Great Plains in North Dakota. The whole thing happens in one continuous sequence. Pre-combustion, the coal is cleaned and the oil is cleaned at the same time. The whole thing comes down to an immensely profitable and cost-effective operation. We are talking about competition at the moment, but the Bill says grudgingly that the competition will be applied to both pre-combustion and post-combustion. Forget post-combustion; just get on with pre-combustion cleaning and you will get to the promised land. It really is the answer. I saw something recently that came very close to one of those moments in one’s life, which do not occur too often, when you think, "God, I’ve just seen the holy grail". This happened in Dublin. The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, mentioned it in passing without actually naming it when he talked about tidal streaming in Ireland. It is very nearly ready to go, and it is fantastic. Ireland’s concept is that it has a constant shifting tidal base around the whole island. It is the nearest land mass to us anyway. It can harness the energy with a complete ring of turbines embedded in the seabed to soak up the benefit of the tide as it moves around the whole coast, build a grid around the coastline to capture it, and transmit it by ship to Holyhead for us more cheaply than any other method going. There are other available options, too. No one has said anything tonight about geothermal energy, yet it was said at the European Community’s Renewable Energy Policy Conference at Budapest, which I had the honour to attend on behalf of your Lordships’ House last year, that the wonders of geothermal energy are simply there for the world to take if we can get them. You can get geothermal energy anywhere where you can get through the surface of the earth. The easiest place to do this is currently Norway, but there would be a big degradation of it in transmission to us from Norway. On the other hand, Norway could convert it into hydrogen. If we converted some tankers into hydrogen carriers, could we not develop a station that was driven by hydrogen on a very cheap basis out of Norway, because we could do it very cheaply from Norway with its consent? Bit by bit, we would reach our 2020 with 5 per cent here and 5 per cent there on each on these methods, but we are fooling ourselves if we think that we can do it with wind alone, and we will make ourselves look like the stupid boys of 2020 because we will be out of line with everyone. Let us not despair. Let us take heart from the fact that there are things that we can do. We just need someone to gather together the threads of all these things and get on with it. We are not getting on with it, so let us please do something a little positive.