I thank the Cabinet Secretary for her statement and preface what I’m going to say by saying that I don’t doubt for one second her own personal commitment and interest in this subject, but I’m afraid this statement is like a lot of Government statements we’ve had of late—very long on process, very short on detail and virtually negligible in terms of targets. I think it’s very disappointing, really, that we’ve got to this stage without more detail and more flesh on what ‘Energy Wales’ actually will mean in terms of targets for the Government.

There’s nothing I can disagree with in terms of the high-level aims of the statement. It says,

‘First, we will reduce the amount of energy we use in Wales.’

Great. By how much? By when? How? Secondly,

‘We will reduce our reliance on energy generated from fossil fuels.’

Again, great. By how much, when, and how? The only target in the statement is the UK Government target to do away with coal combustion by 2025. And thirdly,

‘We will actively manage the transition to a low carbon economy.’

Well, the same questions arise, but let’s give very immediate questions to that. We’ve got cities already banning diesel cars in 10 years’ time—Copenhagen saying, ‘We won’t have any fossil fuel cars by 2025.’ What are our cities doing? What’s the city region doing? What’s the Welsh Government doing to achieve those aims within the Welsh context?

Electric vehicles—you want electric vehicle infrastructure. Simple: no development in Wales with car parking can go ahead without electric vehicle charging points. Just get a structure put in over five to 10 years like that.

Hydrogen—where’s the role of hydrogen in mass transportation, commercial transportation, and particularly for the south Wales metro? We can jump electrification of our railways by going straight to hydrogen transport. These are the things that I want to see in a vision from Welsh Government.

I think it’s frustrating, because we know that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity, we know the Welsh Government has targets of reduction of 80 per cent in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and we know we’ve got the tools here in Wales to deal with it. We have huge natural resources and we can easily be self-sufficient in meeting our electricity needs through renewable energy.

So, just to come to a couple of specific questions on where we can actually, hopefully, agree and deliver something on this. First of all, on energy efficiency, yes, we have energy efficiency programmes, but what now is the new energy efficiency programme for the Welsh Government? What’s its target? It is completely realistic to think of 150,000 low-income homes being made energy efficient by 2020 by using, for example, borrowing powers as well as sources such as the Green Investment Bank. So, is there a commitment now to large-scale home retrofitting programmes? Is there a commitment to phase out opencast coal mining in Wales? Yes, a ban on fracking, but let’s phase out opencast mining as well, because we know that we won’t have the combustion plants, really, to take that coal, so why are we continuing to allow opencast coal mining in the long-term future? Is there a commitment and a way of working to improve the relationship between Welsh Government and the National Grid on distributed and local grid networks?

Interestingly, yesterday, it was Cornwall, with the help of European funding, that announced the first local energy market being established here in the United Kingdome. Centrica British Gas are leading on that with local partners in Cornwall. Why isn’t Wales doing that? Why is it Cornwall and not Wales that’s taking us forward in that regard? And why, although we talk of the tidal lagoon, don’t we have more in the statement around marine energy? The tidal lagoon is a decision at the moment for the Westminster Government, but we have a lot that we can do to support marine energy here in Wales.

And finally, my final point is this: you have agreed in the past that you’re prepared to consider supporting the establishment of a national energy company, which Plaid Cymru calls ‘Ynni Cymru’—a not-for-dividend company at arm’s length from the Welsh Government, so that we can invest any profits in improved services and energy reduction and also deliver cheaper energy more directly to the consumer. That energy company could enable the development of local energy programmes; local energy markets; community energy; the mass installation of solar panels; businesses and public bodies to become more energy efficient; and the task of reducing the consumption of energy in homes and businesses. As clearly you have the ambition, but as equally clearly, Government does not have the wherewithal or, it seems to me, the appetite to actually deliver on this, what about establishing a company to do this on your behalf?