My Lords, Amendment 30 would introduce a new clause into Chapter 4 of the Bill, which is about reducing carbon emissions and home heating costs. We have heard quite a lot about Greg Barker today, but this clause was actually tabled under the previous Government to be an amendment to the previous Energy Bill—as they have guillotines in the other House and a different way of selecting amendments, it was never discussed—and I know that Greg Barker and Charles Hendry, who both now have ministerial positions, were in support of it.
The amendment explains to people exactly what it is doing, but I thought that it might be helpful if I said a bit about what the different technologies are. Gas savers are devices that can be fitted above a boiler to track the waste heat. They improve the efficiency of the boiler because it builds up a reservoir of hot water so that when consumers turn on the tap, hot water arrives rather sooner. This has been described as ““free to users”” because you have not wasted the heat—you have used it to heat the water. They also reduce the wastage of water, and warm water arrives sooner at the tap; this gas saver won an award from Waterwise because of that. It heats the cold water going into the boiler, thus meaning that the boiler has to do less work to heat to the required temperature if warm water is going in rather than cold water. In a nutshell, this facility uses the waste heat from boilers to heat water. That is what gas savers are.
At some point today there was mention of the various technologies that allow us to use our power more efficiently. We have heard all sorts of figures about how much electricity we use with things that are left on standby, but currently there are no limits to how much power an appliance can use while it is on standby, and some things have to be on all the time—you tend not to turn them off, so a lot of energy is wasted. In the UK, standby represents about 80 per cent of residential electricity use. The proposal to limit standby power to between 0.5 watts and 2 watts could save 73 per cent of this wasted energy. I will not go through all the figures, but you reach 2 per cent of the total UK energy use if you take on these types of measures. Not only would they mean that we were not using the power but it would be another way of lowering people’s electricity bills.
The same goes for demand response. Another technology, dynamic demand technology, responds to the voltage in the national grid, and that was mentioned earlier today. These devices use electricity at times only at times when it is plentiful. When electricity demand is high, the appliances turn off; they turn back on again only when demand has dropped. Modern technology makes it possible for us to do this in a way that we would never have been able to do years ago. The current cost to the National Grid of dealing with fluctuating levels of demand is about £80 million, because we keep power stations running at part or half power so that they can quickly be turned up to full power when we get extra demand. If you have dynamic demand systems in appliances, that means we would need less of this type of facility, which wastes quite a lot of power. While the technology does not lead to less electricity being used by the consumer, it would help to save because we would not be running power stations at low power.
Voltage optimisation technology acts to reduce the incoming voltage to domestic and non-domestic buildings from the national grid. You can take it down from the standard 240 volts to 230 volts, which reduces the energy use for some appliances by up to 10 per cent. Not all appliances react in the same way to lower voltage, so the overall savings would be only 8 per cent. This is something that would enable electricity Bills to be reduced, which is something that we are very concerned about, especially with the fuel poor and with utility prices going up all the time.
Most of us are familiar with daylight responsive lighting. It also reduces the electricity consumption of lights. Lighting accounts for 39 per cent of end-use electricity. We are not always looking at good things coming out of Greece, but a paper by a Green scientist suggested that the use of daylight responsive lighting could reduce electricity consumption by 50 per cent to 70 per cent. Of course, they live in a rather sunnier place than us, so those figures would not be quite so good here.
The amendment is to encourage the Government to ensure that they get best advice about how these sorts of technologies can be used to reduce our carbon emissions and help people to keep their electricity bills down. I beg to move.
Energy Bill [HL]
Proceeding contribution from
Baroness Maddock
(Liberal Democrat)
in the House of Lords on Wednesday, 26 January 2011.
It occurred during Debate on bills
and
Committee proceeding on Energy Bill [HL].
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
724 c254-5GC 
Session
2010-12
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
Subjects
Librarians' tools
Timestamp
2023-12-15 20:51:02 +0000
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