My Lords, I remind the Committee of my interests as a generator of small-scale hydroelectricity and as a recipient of feed-in tariff payments.
I do not have any specific comments on the SI, which simply fixes a wrinkle in the various energy support schemes, but I point out the concern raised by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee that up to 60,000 domestic customers may be missing out on the support available. The Minister has given some examples of what the Government are doing, but it seems that more could be done to ensure that domestic customers do not miss out on this money. How many heat networks are there and have we made attempts to contact all of them to push them into making applications?
I take this opportunity to ask the Minister more generally about progress in dealing with the underlying distortions that made the schemes necessary in the first place. As he said, the support schemes arose because of the substantial increases in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was entirely understandable and right to support people and businesses under those circumstances, but those schemes did nothing to fix the underlying distortions in the electricity markets that are, in part, the cause of the high pricing.
The key feature is the fact that the price is driven by the marginal pricing of electricity and therefore by the price of gas. That means that the price of electricity from all sources, including renewables, where the generation cost fell during the same period, was driven by the increased gas cost. It meant that people on apparently 100% renewable tariffs saw their electricity prices more than double, even though the cost of renewables had fallen. Quite apart from raising the question of how legitimate those renewable-only tariffs are, this led to some generators earning supernormal profits at the expense of consumers. The support schemes meant that we saw the strange situation of some generators having their excess profits subsidised by the Government. The same was even more true of the gas producers.
I realise that it is more complex than that, as I am sure the Minister will say, especially with the expansion of contracts for difference, but it is generally recognised that electricity prices need to be decoupled from the marginal rate, and especially from gas prices, to remove the distortions and fluctuations that the current situation generates. I asked the Minister about this in an Oral Question on 6 September 2022. He referred then to
“the review of market arrangements, which is looking urgently at that exact situation”.—[Official Report, 6/9/22; col. 91.]
Yet I see that the Government have today launched yet another consultation covering, among other things, exactly the same issue. Launching another consultation does not feel like the urgency that he promised 18 months ago. Can he provide an update on progress and when
we might finally see electricity pricing decoupled from the marginal cost of gas generation and the market distortions reduced?
5.15 pm