Lord Fuller (Con)

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of my noble friend Lord Hamilton of Epsom on carbon accounting. He said that he does not know very much about oilseed rape, but I do. About 20 years ago, in some of the very earliest stages of emissions reduction, I was involved commercially in that. My noble friend asked that we should have pilot plants and studies to see whether the energy balance of oilseed rape can be done, as if it has never been done before. I can tell your Lordships that pilot plants were set up on Teesside, at enormous expense, and analysed to death. Although this is not a debate on farming, I can say that, at normal yields, when all was said and done, after the ploughing, sowing, fertilising, spraying, harvesting, processing and transportation, you came ahead on a carbon basis only when or if you burned the straw that otherwise would have been left behind in the field. Of course, at low yields, you spent more carbon on growing it than you got back at the end. I make no other comment save to say that my noble friend is correct that, often, superficially attractive green energy schemes, when you boil them down, cost more carbon than they yield. That is important to look at because, otherwise, we could sleepwalk into an enormous waste of public funds through GB Energy, chasing projects that do not hit the target—which, of course, is to allow us to be more sustainable in future.