Speeches by Shanks.

“I am the Minister for Energy, which covers most of the energy system, so from transmission and network to renewables, to oil and gas in our transition in the North sea, to Great British Energy, as well as looking at the cross-cutting issues of energy security and resilience.”

“It was a wonderful trip.”

“I am not close enough to the individual offers. NESO is running that side of the process. The timeline has taken longer than any of us would have liked. Partly that is to do with the complexity of the individual offers. NESO has now completed its steps and it is with the transmission owners and, in turn, the DNOs to ma…”

“There are jobs already being created right now from projects the National Wealth Fund has funded. Today’s new strategy for the NWF was about doubling down on what its commitment is. I am really delighted that right at the heart of that is clean power projects across the country, and with a commitment to looking at the …”

“I am happy to take away the point and consider it. I understand the rationale for raising it. It is a fair consideration. Even for nationally significant infrastructure projects that make it to my Department for decision, although we have an overall national goal of meeting certain targets, those individual application…”

“There is quite a lot in that question that is really important. First of all, on the technology point, we consulted on broadening that away from just being onshore wind to other technologies. That does not mean that we would take the same view for every technology. If you look at nuclear, for example, it is not part of…”

“We committed to that target and it was in the clean power action plan. It is an ambition that we have. The local power plan will not break down exactly that 8 GW target, because we do not want to focus purely on gigawatts. We want to focus on the individual projects. Our ambition is that we will meet that through a com…”

“I partly want to be slightly careful. I am not an expert in planning and my Department is not shaping this policy in that space through the local power plans. I want to be slightly careful about that. The balance that I tried to get across earlier is that projects should be judged on their merits based on the impact th…”

“I am not going to give advice to them. What we have said is that we want to strategically plan where our AI growth zones are, so that we are making use of constraints, wherever possible, and benefiting from things that we are currently spending money on. Secondly, we want to try to connect as many demand projects to th…”

“That is great, whoever said that in Parliament. It is brilliant.”

“Is it me? I agree with that. I agree with myself. There are multiple ways of looking at this. There is a straightforward way of communities benefiting directly, and you heard earlier on about the reforms that will allow communities to net off supply versus demand so that they do benefit from that. There are also ways—a…”

“I did not see all of the previous panel, but if I understand the point, it comes down to defining community energy, which is something that we will do. That is not quite the same, and so we do need to come up with a definition of community energy. Many people think, “Why is that complex?” The reason it is complex is th…”

“No, we are not prescribing and not setting a target, but I have been very clear that that does not mean that we do the projects that might be more straightforward to get over the line at the cost of others. There has to be a balance, and the local power plan really outlines the fact that there has to be both of those e…”

“What I said previously is that we are not going to fix a number on it, but there has to be a mix. The reason that I am saying that is that I want to avoid putting a number on it and that then being seen as a ceiling on our ambition on either local or on community. I do not make any judgment about one being better than …”

“We will put a definition on a statutory footing, so that it is very clear to everyone what the Government define community energy as. That is a very good definition, but community-owned energy will be slightly narrower than some of those points. It picks up on the key elements that it is about the ownership structure, …”

“First of all, on the 1,000 projects, I would emphasise that it says “at least 1,000 projects”. I say that genuinely because that is not a ceiling on our ambition. What we want to see within that is a real mix of projects. We know that there are some really good local energy projects. We have tried to fund, for example,…”

“Yes.”

“I have wrestled with this; we have wrestled with this. In theory, I could say yes, because it seems like absolutely the right thing to achieve the outcome that we want. When we get into the reality of how we then do that with a queue that is already complex, the competing priorities—of course, this is really important …”

“Emma might want to come in on some of those points, but let me take it head on. I am accountable for this to Parliament. On the question of who is responsible for it, we have set up Great British Energy as a publicly owned energy company to be our energy champion and for the public to own a share in it. It will drive f…”

“That is the vision we really have. Solar panels on the rooftop of the school are great. I have visited a number of them. They reduce the bills of the school. The money goes straight back into schools and they spend it on all the things we want schools spending money on, but you can see a school as a real hub for commun…”