Energy Security

That is a slightly ridiculous question; that was such a long time ago. Renewables hardly existed 10 years ago. So much has changed in the past decade and so much could have been done. Over the next 15 years all but one of our nuclear fleet of power stations will be withdrawn from service, a third of our coal plants will be decommissioned and we will need about 25 GW of new electricity generating capacity to keep pace with our expected needs and the predicted economic growth. As my hon. Friends have pointed out already, the Government have been aware of that impending supply gap for years. Let me remind the House of what they said in the energy review a mere two years ago. They said that if, as the modelling of the then Department of Trade and Industry suggested, the closure dates of nuclear and coal-fired power stations coincided in about 2015—and we all now know that they will—"““market participants may not be able to respond by developing and commissioning new power stations in a timely fashion.””" That was in 2006. What has happened since? We have heard a great deal about nuclear power, although new reactors are still unlikely to be operating much before 2020. However, to give credit where credit is due—I am doing my best—I recognise that the Government have worked to identify the concerns of potential investors and to put in place a framework that answers some of those concerns; I pay tribute to the work of Dr. Tim Stone in achieving that. However, we are now waiting for talk to convert into action. In the meantime, we have added only one percentage point to our current renewable capacity, and that will not get near to meeting even the Government's original target of 10 per cent. by 2010, let alone the targets subsequently established by the European Union. We also have a Government who seem to be intent on building a new generation of coal-fired power stations at almost any cost, leaving future generations with a massive carbon headache. The problem for the Government is that they know that they have ducked the big decisions over the past 10 years. We have had White Papers, reviews, consultations and strategies, the latest of which—it was only a consultation—was published last Thursday, yet it still feels as though the momentum that the country needs for investment and change has hardly got beyond first base. Much of the blame attaches to the Prime Minister, who did little for the environment while Chancellor and who, now he is Prime Minister, simply does not understand energy markets. He asked Sir Nicholas Stern to write a report on climate change and then totally ignored most of its main proposals. He could have helped to establish the first UK pilot scheme for carbon capture and storage at Peterhead, but he ignored it and the project collapsed. He put £50 million into a fund to develop marine renewables, but made the conditions to access it so complex that so far not a single penny has been given away. His latest trick was to try to persuade OPEC to turn on the taps and invest its cash in our green technologies. That stunt, which turned into a humiliating begging mission abroad, showed scant understanding of what oil is or how the international commodities markets work. One cannot ask the Saudis to pump more oil when it is the wrong kind of oil and when global refining capacity is already strained, and one cannot expect the price of oil to go down when the pricing structure is far more dependent on militant attacks in Nigeria or the falling value of the dollar than on a few more barrels of Arab heavy.