Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-66)
SUSSEX ENERGY
GROUP
17 OCTOBER 2006
Q60 Chairman: We are going to Woking
in a couple of weeks' time.
Dr Watson: I will not second-guess
what they will tell you then.
Q61 Judy Mallaber: Can it be done
by other people?
Dr Watson: I think they will tell
you it can but I must admit that I do not fully understand the
details, if you like the business model of how that has been made
to work. But a certain amount of will on the part of that particular
individual and real effort has been made and they have made it
work. So I think the Woking example is a very important example.
I am just not sure how far that can be replicated to other places,
but certainly the person responsible is now with the London Climate
Change Agency and is thinking about implementing similar things
on a larger scale in London itself.
Q62 Judy Mallaber: What is the Kirklees
example?
Dr Watson: The Kirklees example
is rolling out, in particular, solar PV around housing and schemes
to do that. Raphael has done a little reading up on that one recently.
Mr Sauter: The main part was they
are only focused on PV technology, which they tried to install
in new buildings or refurbishments of public buildings and in
particular new residential areas, and I think the target was to
cover 5% of the local electricity demand by PV and it was a project
that was co-funded by the European Commission in the framework
of other European projects, which was obviously quite successful
also in terms of decrease of costs of PV, setting up of a local
installers' network. This is what I know of the Kirklees case.
Dr Watson: I think the general
conclusion on these local experiments—there are lots of
them, you can point to Leicester as well where they have an eco-house
and they have put wind turbines in schools and that kind of thing,
and one of my students looked at the example of Nottingham, where
they have had again a very active energy adviser in the council
who has helped people apply for grants for solar hot water heating
systems—the people concerned said that, "It was that
person who really made the decision for me to go and do that."
So I think that local activities have a tremendous role to play
and are probably under-resourced.
Q63 Judy Mallaber: How feasible is
it? Can a local authority do something substantial within their
resources or does this require a lot of expensive set-up money
to get going?
Dr Watson: I think it has been
demonstrated that they can. Another example is the Merton 10%
rule, which is using the planning system for new buildings to
get 10% of energy from on-site renewables on new buildings in
general. So there are powers that they have but I think particular
areas that we hear about that are under-resourced are things like
the independent energy advice and that is a potential role for
councils and is something that could come under their remit, and
that could be strengthened a lot, particularly into the area of
microgeneration.
Q64 Mr Binley: The resource issue
is a very important one because you are talking about a historical
situation and I think that if we were to get this moving we would
need to rethink because at the moment money in local government
is very scarce indeed, and you know that the whole PFI thing impacts
upon this too. So have you done any work on this as the situation
stands at this moment?
Dr Watson: No, we have not; that
is not an area we would look at.
Q65 Mr Bone: We are having thousands
of new homes built in my constituency as part of Government policy
and I think what my council was saying was why on earth has the
Government not made it a condition of the new house building that
renewable energy is built into it as well as efficiency, and I
think they wanted a view on that, why the Government has not been
bolder on new-build?
Dr Watson: I have asked the same
question and one of the positives in the Energy Review announced
a study of the Thames Gateway Development, for example, as to
how that could be made lower carbon than it otherwise would be,
because a lot of these concepts and ideas for distributed energy
networks, lots of distributed sources at different scales and
the kind of way in which those grids might be controlled, which
is very different to our centralised system, and I think those
new developments are a golden opportunity to put those in from
the start because it is much cheaper to do it that way. So I would
certainly hope that the government would be much stronger as looking
at those as real opportunities to do things like this.
Q66 Chairman: At the risk of repeating
myself, that technology in those individual homes will quite often
be local heat systems rather than electricity generation systems.
Dr Watson: Yes, I talked about
grids but, apologies, I meant heat as well and that is as important
if not more important, perhaps.
Chairman: Thank you very much; we have
covered a very interesting evidence session. We are most grateful
to you both.
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