Lord Teverson (LD)

When one is first appointed to Parliament, one worries about addressing a huge crowd of parliamentarians and being on the telly as well. I am not feeling too nervous today. I found the Minister’s explanation excellent; I did not understand it particularly from the legislation or the Explanatory Memorandum. I presume that the whole area around potential new gas, in particular combustion power stations, is about aiming for 95% decarbonisation by 2030 rather than 100%, which I understand in terms of pragmatism. On the areas that I do not really understand, the one that I had not really realised is the hydrogen aspect of these regulations. I find it difficult to understand how one would ever convert a gas power station to a hydrogen power station in a way that would make any economic sense whatever in terms of gas storage coming in and perhaps being used as part of the capacity mechanism. The hydrogen would have to be green hydrogen, which means that it is probably generated by electricity in the first place—so why would one de-convert it through various inefficiency mechanisms for it then to go through a degassed power station? That just does not seem logical to me. On that, the other risk seems to be that—I am not a technical expert on this, obviously—the conversion from a gas-fired power station to a hydrogen-fired power station is probably not that different, and therefore the cost of conversion, or of being hydrogen-ready, is not very great. Carbon capture and storage, however, is a major conversion and, presumably, it has to be near facilities that can store carbon: either a carbon pipeline, which we went through all the legislation for in the last Energy Act, or something on the coast, so it can go undersea. So I ask the Minister: is this effectively another loophole like the one that already exists, in that new combustion stations just say that they are hydrogen-ready? In terms of carbon capture and storage, does that very much restrict where they are? I have another concern, although I fully accept what the Government are trying to do here. The Minister mentioned energy from waste plants. We all know that, as part of their planning permission, the plants often have to be ready to have heat networks—but this hardly ever happens. Occasionally it does; there are examples of energy from waste being tapped into heat networks. I just feel that there is a risk that these things can be built in a certain way—I do not know how much they have to be ready or near a connection—but in reality they will never happen. Certainly, that tends to be the track record in this area. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s comments, but, generally, I welcome what the Government are trying to do.