Clause 36
Energy Bill
6:00 pm
Malcolm Wicks (Minister of State (Energy), Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform; Croydon North, Labour)
I believe that we are somewhere near the top, but if I can get accurate data to send to the hon. Gentleman, I shall do so. There is a militant tendency, of which I appreciate that my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East is not part, to suggest that other countries are way ahead on everything. They are not. We are one of the leading nations, partly for geographical reasons—we are an island people—in marine technology.
The ETI was formed specifically as a collaboration between industry and the Government in 2007 to take forward R and D work in the energy sector. In December last year, it launched two calls for expressions of interest, one of which focuses on marine technologies. Since 1999, more than £35 million has been committed to research and development, which had led to a number of marine technologies being developed and tested at full scale. The Government have also invested in the European marine energy centre in Orkney, which I had the good fortune to visit and which is a £50 million dedicated test facility for wave and tidal technology developers. The South West of England Regional Development Agency’s £28 million wave hub project is also important. It is a purpose-built proving ground for larger-scale demonstrations.
The hon. Gentleman would not want to give the wrong impression because he is an optimist by nature, but already our country is doing a great deal on research and development. It is important to keep the MRDF to support larger-scale demonstration for the next important phase of the innovation process for the development of marine technologies. To repeat a phrase, of which I am not the author, there is always an interim period. Sometimes the money is available for research and development—I am arguing that we have put a good deal in—but the gap between that and deployment is often the difficulty before it becomes commercial and profitable: the so-called valley of death.
That is why there is a strong argument for keeping the fund for its original purpose, rather than, as the hon. Gentleman seeks to persuade me, to push it early into the process for further research and development to compete with the other technologies. I want to keep the fund to support larger-scale demonstrations for the next important phase, and in my view the proposed changes would dilute that focus and risk duplication with other research and development funding available from the Government.
I understand the hon. Gentleman’s question about Pelamis, which is not to be confused with the old refrain, “Och, och, och, there’s a monster in the loch”, which I think was Polaris—I must not go back to my radical youth. At that stage I had a quarrel with another form of nuclear technology. The Ernst and Young report did not recommend three ROCs. I am advised that for wave and tidal stream, it assessed only the costs of technologies. I am told that it made no recommendations.
We expect schemes to come forward in the UK over the next few years to exceed the level in Portugal, helped in part by the support offered through our banding proposals, but if there is an opportunity now with Pelamis to test the technology and in simple terms to have it in the water for long enough to prove its effectiveness, I rather welcome that. I am a patriot and, as someone reminded us the other day, a patriot is someone who does not hate other countries. I rather welcome Portugal’s interest in the technology, and I hear that the contract is a commercial one.
That is the situation, and I am sure that I have persuaded the hon. Gentleman that we are doing enough for him to consider withdrawing his amendment. That does not bring me to his new clause, so I shall sit down and hope that someone moves us on to new clause 17.