8. Plaid Cymru debate: Hydrogen energy

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:37 pm on 27 June 2018.

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Photo of Mr Simon Thomas Mr Simon Thomas Plaid Cymru 5:37, 27 June 2018

Thank you. Can I thank everyone who took part in this debate? It was a short debate to note the publication of the report, but I can promise you I'll bore you about hydrogen for some time to come, and I've got a few enthusiasts around as well, so that's good to see.

This is a technology that I think does a lot to tick a lot of boxes that we're interested in in Wales. It's innovative. It happened to be designed here, which adds to the romance; it doesn't matter really, but it does add to it. It's something that decarbonises our transport sector and has potential in other areas as well. I just want to say at the outset that I very much—although I won't necessarily support all the amendments—do understand the spirit in which those amendments have been made: they're constructive, and we're having a debate that's trying to put together some ideas around the potential for hydrogen.

The key thing is that we need green hydrogen on the whole. There is some brown hydrogen as a by-product that can continue to be part of the mix, I think, but producing hydrogen directly from fossil fuel makes no sense whatsoever. But using what was described, actually, by Alan Whitehead, who speaks for the Labour Party in the UK, as he described it in the New Statesman

'the emergence of a large load of variable power', that is renewables of course,

'onto the system it may be that this "surplus" electricity is becoming available' for the production of hydrogen. As I quoted back to Russell in his reasonable questions, it now seems that storing surplus electricity as hydrogen is as cost-effective as—in fact, some of the experts and the users of this say it's more cost-effective than—storing it as electricity. And we also then avoid some of the costs of batteries that Michelle Brown mentioned, and I mean environmental costs as well as the actual cost. So, there is huge potential there.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this debate, and we did focus on transport, but there is a role for hydrogen in heat. Those of us who remember town gas—not me, but if you do remember town gas—town gas was about 40 per cent hydrogen. There's still a town gas office in Aberystwyth, actually. It's got Aberystwyth Gas Company above it. We used to produce town gas from coal. We used to compress coal and burn it to produce hydrogen. That was our gas system. Our current gas system—gas mains—doesn't like more than a tiny percentage of hydrogen in it, but we need to work with the gas providers to see whether we can pump a little more hydrogen into the gas system because it then has—. We produce it for transport, we can produce it for heat, we can produce it then to decarbonise wider in the economy.

Can I finally say that the comments of the Cabinet Secretary were much more upbeat than, I think, the amendment from the Government? So, I'm going to rely on his comments, not the amendment, and I'm going to hope that that means that we can have a real debate, going forward in the Assembly, and can indeed work to put Wales at—. Albeit technology-neutral, there are huge opportunities here. People are investing already, and I want to see Wales being part of that, and leading on that. I'll take his comments, rather than the amendment, as a sign of hope ahead.