Contribution
I also apologise, as I am sure that the House is a little fed up hearing the Minister and me this afternoon.
I thank the Minister for advance sight of this statement. In the past few weeks it has been difficult not to feel at least a little sorry for Ministers in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. First, their Secretary of State was forced out of hiding to defend a third runway at Heathrow—something that he once said that we could not do because it would make us look “completely ridiculous”. Cornwall Insight has stated that Ministers will miss their clean power target by a country mile, and I think it was clear during the urgent question that they are getting ready to be overruled by the Prime Minister on approval of the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields—something that we on the Opposition Benches would welcome.
Now the Secretary of State has sent the hon. Gentleman to the House this afternoon to defend the farce of chopping down trees in forests in Canada, converting them into pellets, shipping them across the Atlantic on diesel-chugging ships and burning them in a power station in North Yorkshire, all in the name of net zero. The Conservative party is under new management, and that means confronting hard truths, so let us get one thing straight from the outset: Drax’s biomass plant is neither clean, nor cheap.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) has said, burning wood from the other side of the Atlantic—releasing more carbon dioxide in the process—and labelling it renewable is a product of a carbon budget system that forces politicians to make perverse decisions. Those decisions result in an extortionate level of subsidy, deliver a bad deal for British taxpayers and bill payers, and make the climate worse. We have started a reset on net zero, and we will not shy away from arguing for a more pragmatic approach that prioritises cheap, stable and reliable energy.
Turning to the details of the statement, naturally we welcome a more limited role for Drax biomass in our power system, but more biomass subsidies are needed only in the short term, because this Government are embarking on a reckless experiment to have a grid based entirely on intermittent renewables at the expense of flexible and reliable baseload power. Drax’s role could be filled with more gas power plants, which are cheaper and cleaner than burning trees shipped in from Canada. Ministers know that burning wood at Drax produces four times the emissions of our last coal power plant, which in turn produces around twice the carbon emissions of gas. We could get that gas from the non-subsidised fields in the North sea, if this Government were not in such an ideological rush to shut down our domestic energy industry.
On cost, the new agreement that the Minister has signed us up to comes with a genuinely eyewatering strike price of £160 per MWh in today’s money. That is higher than Drax’s existing agreement of £138 per MWh. In fact, Baringa’s analysis that Drax put out this morning shows that bill payers will still be paying over £450 million a year in subsidies to burn trees. If the analysis behind the Minister’s promise to cut bills by £300 is anything to go by, we should not rely on him too much. Has his Department carried out its own independent analysis, separate from that published by Drax this morning, to determine what the increased strike price will cost the British people and how that compares to supporting extra gas power in the capacity market?
We welcome the strengthened sustainability criteria, as investigations by Ofgem and the BBC’s “Panorama” have revealed serious questions to be answered by Drax about the import of wood from untouched primary forests in British Columbia. But as the BBC journalist Joe Crowley, who reported on these issues for “Panorama”, stated this morning, more clarity is needed on whether wood from primary forests will be classed as unsustainable under this new regime. Will the Minister confirm that Drax will not be allowed to burn wood from primary forests during any of its generation—not just that which is subsidised? What work is being done to ensure that the new sustainability criteria are actually enforceable?
On sustainability reporting, will the Minister confirm that the Department has received the KPMG report that the Prime Minister said he would look at? Will a copy be placed in the Library? The Minister’s statement has left the door wide open for the introduction of power BECCS after the transition arrangements end in 2031. That proposal to fit first-of-a-kind technology solely for the purpose of meeting our carbon budgets would cost the bill payer up to £40 billion—£1.7 billion a year. That is unacceptable. Will the Minister confirm whether his Department has produced any analysis of what a system without BECCS would cost? Will he rule out keeping this racket going indefinitely, with people’s energy bills rising to pay for BECCS?
Will the Government set a date for the burning of the last tree in a British biomass power station? This Government have been promising us clean, cheap, home-grown energy, but burning trees at Drax is not clean or cheap, and the trees are certainly not home-grown. If the widespread burning of forests is part of the solution to climate change, we have to ask ourselves if that is the problem we are trying to solve.