Community Energy Schemes — [Mr Clive Betts in the Chair]

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 3:29 pm on 30 November 2021.

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Photo of Alan Whitehead Alan Whitehead Shadow Minister (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) (Energy and Climate Change), Shadow Minister (Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) 3:29, 30 November 2021

I congratulate Wera Hobhouse on obtaining the debate this afternoon and on putting forward the case for local energy, particularly for a community energy Bill, in such a succinct and complete way. That means I do not have to say all the things that I was going to say about a local community energy Bill, other than to say that we on the Opposition Benches thoroughly support such a Bill. We think it would make a tremendous difference to the way that local energy can move forward.

At its heart, it has a simple proposition, which is that people should be able to sell the energy they produce to their neighbours, their friends, the people down the road, their local industry and shops. As we can envisage, that sort of environment would not only make a tremendous change in how people relate to their own energy, but would potentially be a great step forward in the appreciation of what we need to do, as far as energy is concerned, in the low carbon environment we will have in the future. Energy is something that people do, rather than something they simply receive. That seems to be the essence behind the idea that people can sell the energy they produce to their local community.

It is a simple proposition and we know what a difference it would make, so why not just do it tomorrow? What are the barriers in the face of the proposal? To go to the point made by Peter Aldous, we seem to have been here on a number of occasions. He has a similarly long pedigree in talking about the same issues that I have raised, both on the Environmental Audit Committee and elsewhere. He is right that we seem to turn up in the House talking about this issue on a fairly regular basis, and nothing whatsoever changes.

My particular involvement in the issue goes back to a 2013 Energy and Climate Change Committee inquiry on local energy, which I chaired, that looked at the barriers to how local energy can go forward, remarked that there was not a great deal of local energy going on and talked about the potential for local energy. We have heard this afternoon about the potential from now on, but at the time we were saying we could have perhaps 3 GW of local energy overall in this country by 2020. What have we got today? About 270 MW, something like that.

If we look at the various projects have contributed to that 278 MW, we have heard mention of a number of the co-operatives and organisations that have actually produced local energy, but pretty much to a project—I have seen a lot of projects in my time—they have been carried out with heroic dedication, overcoming tremendous obstacles and, in some instances, have failed at great cost to themselves and other people. It would be so easy just to make it possible for those schemes to happen. I congratulate and commend all those people who have generated the 278 MW of local energy that we have so far. The fact that we have any at all is a remarkable tribute to them, not to the system we have.

That is where we need to be very clear. The obstacles in the way of local energy are very much about the question of local supply, but there are a lot of other obstacles as well, which hon. Members have mentioned this afternoon. The idea is that people are trying to set up a local scheme to produce a pretty modest amount of energy for local consumption, important though all those local schemes are in terms of aggregation across the country. However, people have many obstacles to overcome and are required by the planning system to get permission in place. They need to spend perhaps a million pounds per project just to get a modest scheme going. If the rules were different, people would be able to put that million pounds into the development of the project and not throw it away on a possibly unsuccessful scheme in the first instance.

Selaine Saxby gave the example of the local brewery getting its cars on the road. People might think that is a fanciful example, but it is absolutely how the grid system works at the moment. There is an assumption that every single electron that is produced goes literally from Land’s End to John O’Groats and back again before going into a lightbulb and that it is charged as such, even if it had come from two doors down the road. That is the assumption. The introduction of local energy into the system is often regarded as a tremendous nuisance and loss of load. We cannot actually see where it is, and it is not easy to balance in the grid. That means that the last to get connections into the distributing grid are the local energy schemes. The charging regime for those schemes, once in operation, assumes that they are national schemes, just locally based.