Yes, it is robust in that sense, but the reason it is robust is because almost any conceivable change in gas price is completely swamped by the enormous increase in the carbon tax from £16 now—and less than £2 in the ETS—to up to between £200 and £500 per tonne by 2050. Of course the conclusion is robust. If we assume that there will be a massive tax on carbon, it will be cheaper to have lower carbon rather than higher carbon, but so what? CFDs are included in the Bill, but they have virtually nothing to do with this amendment. We keep on hearing that it is about electricity decarbonisation, but it is not. That was only inserted in the Committee stage of the Bill.
The amendment is about hitting the renewable energy directive for 15% of all energy production in this country—not just the electricity sector, which makes up approximately a third—to be from renewables by 2020. However, that will set back decarbonisation across the whole country, because it is a very expensive way to decarbonise. All the savings we can make through energy efficiency, better insulation of people’s homes, or, I hope the Minister will not mind me saying, through different lighting that saves money across the network, are no good or will only work on the denominator, because we are forced to hit, by 2020, the 15% renewables target—33% of electricity—set by the EU Commission. That will be grotesquely expensive and will lead not to innovation in low-carbon technologies, but to the rolling out of fairly mid-tech current generation onshore and offshore wind at twice the price. That will absorb a huge proportion of the £9.8 billion and lead to very little advance in technology compared with what we could do with proper R and D focused activity. That will happen not because of decarbonisation, but because the EU directive that states that this must be done through renewables.
Domestically, we are making the situation even worse by inserting further restraints, such as a 12.5% cap on biomass. One way to get closer to hitting the EU target is to use dual firing, where half coal, half wood pellets emit approximately the same amount of carbon as gas, earning a half-renewable credit on the real constraint, the 2020 EU target. We are not allowing that, however. We could pay other countries—Germany, Spain and perhaps Poland—to do a lot those things far cheaper than we could do them ourselves. We have a new Government in Iceland, and £2 billion is the estimate of the capital cost of an interconnector to Iceland for its renewable electricity. These measures are not being considered. Even if the objective is to reduce carbon, that can be done so much cheaper than the proposals that will be forced through by the Bill, which will be millstone around our constituents’ necks for decades to come.