DECC Minister, Lord Hunt says "The Lights Will Not Go Out"

Extracts below from the Daily Hansard record of the House of Lords debate 9th March 2010, Lord Hunt, the DECC minister responsible for the draft National Policy Statement for Nuclear Energy, replied to re-assure Baroness Wilcox that, with 20GW of new power generation consented/under construction/recently completed, the lights will not go out .............

 [BARONESS WILCOX]


"........The Government’s indecision on nuclear power will have huge consequences. Last year, figures were released showing that the Government were predicting power cuts from 2017, starting with a shortfall of 3,000 megawatt hours a year and rising to 7,000 megawatt hours by 2025. We seem to be back in the 1970s. We have an enormous government deficit, public sector strikes and, now, government-sanctioned power cuts. I hope that the Minister will tell uswhether this assessment still stands. Are the Government still expecting power cuts between 2017 and 2025?........"

[LORD HUNT OF KINGS HEATH]

".......Two issues have been put forward by noble Lords. First, it is said that we face severe energy issues over the next 10 years and, secondly, there is a criticism that we are putting too much emphasis on renewable energy. I shall respond, first, to the noble Lord, Lord Reay, and the noble Baroness, LadyWilcox, about the so-called question of the lights going out. Of course, I read the reports produced by Ofgem with interest. Ofgem is an economic regulator; it is not charged with energy policy. Sometimes I think that Ofgem needs to reflect on what it is there to do, rather than produce rather speculative reports from time to time. It is the Government’s responsibility to establish policy in relation to energy and it is our job to ensure that there is security of supply. We will do that. Plenty of energy generation is due to go out of commission over the next 10 or 15 years but, even taking on board the impact of the emission standards legislation from Europe and the natural decommissioning of many of our nuclear power stations, the fact is that over 20 gigawatts of energy supply have just been constructed, are in construction or have received all planning consents, and more gigawatts are coming along in the pipeline. The noble Lord, Lord Reay, raised the question of UKCS. I know that we disagree about the amount of gas that will be required in 2020, and it is really a question of the calculation made about reduced demand, but our best estimate is that in 2020 UKCS could still provide about 50 per cent of our gas requirement. We have seen a big increase in our import capacity. There are many storage projects in the pipeline.When people talk about blackouts in 2017, they sometimes refer to an appendix in a document produced by my department. That appendix refers to outages which happen at the moment—short-term, temporary outages. That is very different from suggesting that suddenly our whole energy supply will collapse at some time in the next decade. That is simply not going to happen