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Draft Overarching National Policy Statement for Energy (EN–1)

My Lords, I shall speak to two of these Motions. The Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, goes slightly further than I would, so I support its sentiment if not its actual wording. It would make it conditional that fossil fuel power stations approved by the IPC met CO2 emission performance standards as laid down by the Secretary of State, but we need some understanding about timescales. Fossil fuel power stations will simply not meet these standards if they are being approved in the next, short period; we need an expectation and a timescale for emission performance standards to be met by these stations. It made my brain hurt to think this through, because the risk of laying emission performance standards on developers of fossil fuel generation capacity is that they will simply stop investing. They will say either that it is too uncertain or that when there has to be retrofitting of abatement technology—carbon capture and storage, or whatever—it will be too expensive, so will be a barrier to investment by these companies. What, though, is the alternative? Is it to say, ““We will build a few coal or gas—or both—generating stations and if they happen to be rather heavy in carbon emissions and we cannot find an economic or practical way to abate that in the future, well, you win some, you lose some””? This does not seem to be entirely in accord with the Government’s climate change policies or with the advice they are receiving from the climate change committee. The answer must be to promote speedy piloting of carbon capture and storage and bring that—if it can be done—to marketability standards. At the same time, we must give developers of power generation a degree of clarity by laying down a date and a standard for EPS to ensure we achieve the decarbonisation of the power sector by 2013 in line with the spirit, if not the exact words, of the recommendations of the Committee on Climate Change. You could say that the new reporting clause in the Energy Bill on more regular reporting on decarbonisation of the power sector and commercialisation of carbon capture and storage might be a driver in itself; we know how government, with great cheerfulness, can continue to report on failure in other fields. You could say that the EU Emissions Trading Scheme will drive decarbonisation, but the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has already said that it is not doing enough to tighten the cap on emissions. Were the EU Emissions Trading Scheme to really be a powerful driver in forcing down and capping emissions, the developers of these stations would be in the same position—they would still have to find one means or another of decarbonising on a retrofitting basis or of reducing the hours of generation of these stations. There is a real conundrum here. An amendment to the Energy Bill, tabled in another place, proposed a timescale for the Government to come forward with a suitable framework set at a manageable level, taking account of the needs for energy security. If that were to be built into the policies we are looking at today, it would give clarity to investors, instead of the current position—that we will try to pilot carbon capture and storage and, if by 2018 it is not working, we will scratch our heads and think of something else. That is a thoroughly unsatisfactory proposition for developers in an area where we need the pace to be maintained if we are to meet the challenge of climate change. As I said, I support the sentiments behind the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, although I would like an element of timescale to be built into it. I now turn to the second battle of Dungeness and to the proposal by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, that Dungeness should come back on to the list of sites that are suitable for the development of new nuclear power on the basis that it would be premature to exclude it. It is clear that he was not impressed by my arguments about spirituality and medicinal leeches, so I shall now try to impress the House with arguments that are based on hard-nosed science, the might of the law and the fear of European fines. This site should be excluded at this point, as even very preliminary analysis at this stage shows that it is patently not suitable. First, it should be excluded on the grounds of flooding and coastal erosion. The Environment Agency hedged its bets a bit and said that you could protect the site against flooding and coastal erosion, but because it sits on an eroding frontage it will also be subject to a rise in sea level. In the agency’s view, therefore, it will face significant difficulties. The best that the agency was prepared to say was that it will have to be further considered. Simply defending the site and holding the line would give rise to issues of habitat regulation, since it would prevent the coastline from changing and adapting naturally. Increased wave heights and increased wave energy as a result of climate change have not yet been assessed at all, so the Environment Agency’s proposition on coastal erosion might have to be considerably changed. Protection from marine flooding relies on an existing seaward shingle embankment and is replenished, not quite daily but almost daily, with fresh shingle to shore it up. The Environment Agency said that it was concerned that it might be increasingly problematic to use present shingling recycling methods and that there is a risk of increasing the complexity of sourcing additional shingle material for beach recharge. Flood protection is a kind of treadmill process. The most important issues for me are not coastal erosion and flood protection but the nature conservation value of Dungeness in its geomorphology, its plant and invertebrate communities and its bird life. It is protected by every designation in the alphabet soup of designations. Under the habitat regulations, it is a Natura 2000 site, a special area of conversation, a special protection area, a Ramsar site as an internationally important wetland, a site of special scientific interest and a national nature reserve. If you can find me another designation of protection, I would be vitally, wonderfully pleased, but I do not think that there are any apart from those. The Government’s decision to drop Dungeness as a potential site for further nuclear development was based primarily on Natural England’s advice on the ability to compensate for the loss of the shingle habitat. This site is highly protected. It is one of the jewels in nature conservation in this country and one of the internationally important sites. It is not just some spare bit of shingle; it is a vitally protected international site. The habitat regulations require that a project that will have an adverse effect on a Natura 2000 site must go ahead only if three conditions are met: there are no alternative solutions; there are imperative reasons of overriding public interest; and compensatory habitat can be provided before the damage occurs. The Dungeness nuclear proposal satisfies none of these conditions. There are alternatives; more than one power station could be built on several sites on the long list of sites, and we could jack up our activities on energy conversation, which would help as well. Secondly, if there are alternatives, almost by definition you cannot say that there is the imperative reason of overriding public interest that we damage this site. Thirdly—this is the killer blow—habitat compensation is not simply about finding more bits of shingle somewhere; it entails finding and establishing shingle with the appropriate vegetation communities. At Dungeness, these shingle and vegetation communities have developed over 5,000 years, and reflect the ridge structure and the way in which the pebbles and sediments have been formed within them. The vegetation is linked to the way in which each ridge has been deposited over history, and there have been successive waves of vegetation colonisation. Even if a fit place for compensatory habitat could be found, the very long timescale—up to 5,000 years for it to form geomorphologically and for similar vegetation to come in—would mean that we might be waiting a long time to build the nuclear power station there. Dungeness is also an important international site with a long and detailed history of scientific study into its geomorphology and vegetation, as well as into its coastal processes. It represents over two-thirds of the exposed shingle habitat in the UK—an internationally protected habitat. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, might say that the nuclear power station proposal only impacts on about 50 hectares, but we do not want to return to the ways of old, which I mentioned when we debated this in the past. It was a kind of axiomatic truth that, if you were going to build a big piece of public infrastructure in the past, you appeared to look for an SSSI to build it on, and we had many public protests as a result. I hope that we have come beyond that and that roads, airports and other strategic developments are not going to be built at the expense of some of these very important habitats directive sites. That was why the habitats directive was invented, and I was proud to play a part in its invention. Surely we can find ways to direct strategic infrastructure—no matter how important for climate change—away from sites of international importance. I was looking for an analogy, and it is a bit like saying that we are going to put advertising hoardings on Westminster Abbey because it happens to have a set of rather well sited walls. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said that the appropriate place for this to be considered would be at the IPC and that it was wrong for the Government to drop this site. The IPC should be given the opportunity to consider it, but when a decision like this is clearly going to be in breach of European law—where the Government get fined, not the IPC, and the fines are substantial and daily—the Government would be well advised not to place Dungeness in harm’s way, as it were, with the risk that the IPC makes the wrong decision and that then the Government get it in the neck from European law and from European fining. We do not need a detailed plan to know that it transgresses European law, even with the high level of initial assessment that has been revealed. I am encouraged rather than deterred by the DECC committee’s mealy-mouthed way of putting its recommendation. The DECC committee’s report on the policy statements asked the Government to keep an open mind and to consider the Shepway District Council evidence. It did not come out and say, ““We think Dungeness should be on the list””; it simply hedged its recommendation. I believe that Dungeness is in the right place in not being on the list, and I hope the Minister will continue to support that.