4. Statement by the Minister for Climate Change: Energy Price Cap

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:11 pm on 8 February 2022.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:11, 8 February 2022

Thanks very much indeed for that, Sam. Absolutely, there are some long-term issues. The whole issue about energy security and energy self-sufficiency is certainly one of them. Our plan, of course, is to get Wales to the point where it's a net exporter of energy, so we are producing so much renewable energy here in Wales that we are able to export it, and all of our needs are met here.

There are a number of things that we need to do in terms of energy generation, but there are also things that we need to do in terms of curbing consumption. That's just around all of the things that we just talked about—optimised retrofit, making sure that our homes are fit for purpose and so on. 

It is also about changing the habits of a lifetime. I constantly say to my children, 'I know that it's an LED, but it still uses some electricity. Shut the light off when you go out of the room.' You get the kind of 'talk to the hand' thing that you get with teenagers, but I do think that the habits of a lifetime are important: unplugging things that you're not using, and just minimise your energy consumption—not because you are poor or because it's a problem, but because it's good for the world, it's good for the planet. The more energy that we don't need to generate, the better off the planet is.

So, we're doing a whole public engagement programme with our carbon budget 2, which goes along those kinds of small behaviour changes that make a huge difference. We will be engaging with the commercial sector on that as well. We've got into the habit over the twentieth century of lighting up our shop windows and our towns in a way that may be not entirely necessary as we go forward into a climate crisis.

But, fundamentally, we do need to produce more renewable energy. We need to take advantage of the enormous abundance of natural resources that we have around us, and we have a number of programmes in place to exploit marine energy—wave power and tidal energy, which are two different things, I've recently learned—wind, solar and all the rest of it. 

I did mention in passing in a previous answer, Deputy Llywydd, that we are having an ongoing conversation with Ofgem, not just about the energy price cap and how it works, although we have obviously had a number of issues with that, but about the grid and the necessity to make that fit for purpose and to allow distributed forms of energy production, so, homes as power stations. That means that you have to have a feed-in as well as a feed-out arrangement on the grid. So, we are having good conversations about how we can get those things to be fit for the twenty-first century, and to get the investment in place to do so.