Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Alton. We have to admire his doggedness in bringing up the question of slave labour in China. As we are totally dependent on so many different exports from China to this country, it is something that we have to bear in mind all the time. I wish him the best with his endeavours, although I do not hold out an awful lot of hope, as the problem is that China produces everything so much cheaper than anywhere else. I support my noble friend Lord Petitgas in his amendment. He has outlined the real problem of investing billions—let us face it, it is billions—of pounds of taxpayers’ money in energy projects. The problem is that the only ones that will become available for the taxpayer, and for the Minister to make his decisions upon, will be projects rejected by the private sector. The fact is that the people who invest in renewable energy are not the people who particularly believe in renewable energy; they believe in making money. The whole technique when putting up a wind farm or a wind turbine is that you test the amount of wind, look at the feed-in tariff from the consumer, do your cash-flow adjustments from there, borrow the money and put up the turbine. My Amendment 85A is to do with the whole question of emissions, about which I am very worried. My amendment says that there should be an annual report, “which must include information on carbon emissions resulting from each of” Great British Energy’s “investments in renewable energy technology”. We have reached the point where we have to look much more closely at the whole question of renewable energy. People think that, if you put up a wind turbine and the wind blows, that is all free, and that you do not create any carbon emissions in putting up a wind turbine. I am afraid that is not true: you do. You create a tremendous carbon footprint when you create the steel. I gather we cannot make it in this country any more, so we have to import it, and there is an increase in carbon emissions when bringing it in. At the end of the day, a serious carbon imprint is involved in putting up a wind turbine. The great advantage of a wind turbine is that, once you have got it up, from thereon in the chances of creating a carbon imprint are rather less. The same applies to solar panels. As we have discussed, solar panels are highly likely to be manufactured in China, and they have to be transported here. The Chinese are creating massive carbon emissions with their industry, which we basically exported to them. When we talk about carbon emissions, we are talking about global emissions; we are not talking about individual emissions here. My real problem is with growing crops and trees which then get burned. Because these are a renewable resource, this is then taken as a renewable source of energy. I have a slight problem with that. Take the very extreme example of oilseed rape, which is grown in this country. When you come to think of it, you create a carbon imprint when the tractor tills the field and sows the crop. I am not an expert in the growing of oilseed rape, but I suspect it needs spraying and fertilising and so forth. All of this adds to the carbon impact. The seeds that come off oilseed rape are then compressed to produce a form of vegetable oil, which is then refined. All of this has a carbon footprint. Eventually, it is burned. I gather that it is proposed to be used for aircraft as a substitute for aviation fuel. When you burn aviation fuel, you are creating a carbon imprint. This does not affect national Governments quite so much because the whole business of the carbon imprint of aviation is not counted against the targets for a particular country. The problem of CO₂, as we know, is a global problem. If we want to clean up the planet generally, we cannot ignore aviation. Many of us also have quite serious worries about Drax power station. For a long time, it was importing the offcuts of North America’s timber industry to burn at the power station. There is obviously a serious carbon imprint involved in cutting down trees, stripping the unwanted bits off them and loading that on to ships, which bring it over the Atlantic to this country. Have we really taken into account the CO₂ emissions this whole process at Drax power station creates? It is rumoured that Drax has moved on to saying that it can take all this bark and stuff and turn it into aviation fuel. That will have the same problems as using oilseed rape. There is a massive carbon imprint all the way through. We are trying to talk about reducing the carbon imprint, and it strikes me that with some forms of renewables we are increasing the carbon imprint unnecessarily. Surely what we should be doing is looking at hydrogen and seeing if we can get that down to a more manageable cost. That could be used in its compressed form in aircraft, heavy vehicles and so forth. The great advantage of hydrogen is that, when it is burned, it produces no carbon. I worry that, although we think we are doing something to help the planet, we are not. If we take that extreme example and go on looking for aviation fuel from oilseed rape in perpetuity, then, in the name of some renewable crop, we will be having very large carbon emissions right the way through the process, in perpetuity. We have to look at the whole question of renewable energy and what form it takes. We need an audit which tells us how much carbon imprint is being made by producing fuel in this way, whichever fuel it is, so that we can make a more objective judgment about whether this is helping the climate and helping to meet CO₂ and net-zero targets, or doing the precise opposite.