My Lords, I have some sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Oates, has just said. My concern is perhaps even a little more profound than his because I do not understand what role the Government see for pumped storage in addressing the problem of intermittency of renewables. The noble Lord focused on the funding mechanism, but what role is it going to have? How large a part do the Government intend that it should play?
However, that is not my purpose in rising. My purpose is to speak to Amendment 225, which relates rather to gas, which is also there to be used to some extent to address the problem of intermittency. I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, and my noble friends Lady McIntosh of Pickering and Lord Frost. The House had a Question on gas storage earlier today and the Minister made some helpful and informative comments in response, but it was largely a backwards-looking Question. It looked at decisions taken in the past, whereas this amendment is intended to look a little more forward. It would require the Government to provide gas storage onshore or under our waters equivalent to 25% of forecast annual demand. However, in a sense, the real purpose is to give the Government an opportunity and to elicit from them some sense of their plans for addressing this question. In the past few months, we have all seen on the television news and in the newspapers, and been gripped by it, that while Germany has been busily filling up its capacious gas storage facilities, we have none whatever, so I think the Committee and the public will be interested to know what the Government intend, if the Minister is capable of giving us an indication today.
I shall make just two points about the amendment. To those who say that we are phasing gas out, I say that the amendment is worded to require 25% of
forecast demand, so if the demand comes down, the amendment still works and the amount stored can be adjusted. I think I am a correct in saying—this emerged at Second Reading—that nobody in the House believes that demand for gas is going to fall to zero, even if it is to fall to quite low or even miniscule levels, so the amendment still works and, planning over the long term and looking forward a number of years, it should be possible to make this workable.
Secondly, I put in 25% as a placeholder as much as anything else. I am very open to the Government making a case for why that number should be higher or lower and why government policy should not be 25% but more or less. I am even open to an argument that the number should be 0%. Indeed, reviewing what the Minister said today, he made the valid point that, unlike Germany, we already have a store, so to speak, of gas in our control; it just happens to be under the sea. I understand that there is a point there.
I think back to the United States in the 1970s, when the oil shock arrived. The United States decided that what it needed was a large oil reserve, so it started pumping oil into specially prepared caverns in the earth. Then I think it struck the US that it was pumping oil out of one bit of the earth and then pumping it into another, and that perhaps this was not as sensible as it might have been, so the policy was gradually abandoned.
The Minister may want to make a similar and parallel point in respect of our own gas reserves. He may say that zero is a perfectly reasonable amount for us to store. If the answer from the Government were zero, it would at least be a decision and a policy. We would be able to scrutinise it and understand the arguments for it. As I say, setting the number at 25 is very much a placeholder. I am not being in any sense dogmatic about what the number should be, but I do feel that the Government should have a number in mind, should be able to justify it—even if it is zero—and should be able, I hope, to tell us what it is.