Laurence Robertson (Shadow Minister, Northern Ireland; Tewkesbury, Conservative)

On this occasion, I shall attempt not to stray on to the issue of Russian gas supplies.

Let us compare the renewables market in this country with that in continental Europe, where the supply of renewable energy is far more prevalent. Continental Europe generates far more electricity from renewable sources than we do. As hon. Members might well be aware, the renewables obligation covers Great Britain, but we manage to generate only about 3.5 per cent. of our electricity from renewable sources compared with the target of 10.4 per cent. by 2010.

Now that it is 2006, that target looks very ambitious, but it does not seem awfully high when we consider the necessity of moving towards the cleaner generation of electricity, for which the necessary technology has been around for some time. For Northern Ireland there is  the non-fossil fuel obligation, but that will be set at only 6.3 per cent. by 2012, which is not terribly ambitious. At the moment, the figure is about 3 per cent.

I accept that there are problems with the promotion of renewable energy in Northern Ireland that do not exist elsewhere in Great Britain, where there is perhaps more potential for the generation of renewable electricity. In encouraging renewable electricity in Great Britain, the Government have made the mistake of depending far too much on windmills. Although they have their place in electricity generation, several problems are associated with them. The biggest is that they are intermittent—when the wind does not blow, we get no electricity. That might seem like an obvious statement, but the wind tends to blow only 30 per cent. of the time, so we get electricity only during that time. The great problem with electricity is that it cannot be stored, so if the wind blows twice as hard one day, we cannot get twice as much electricity and store it for a day when the wind does not blow.

For two years, I have tracked the Government on energy issues and shadowed the Minister for Energy and I think that we need a much broader approach to developing renewable energy. There is far too much emphasis on wind power—

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