13:49 Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)

At the start of this year, we in the Welsh Affairs Committee had the great opportunity, over five days, to visit the United States: New York, Washington DC and Atlanta in Georgia. We were pursuing three inquiries, including how Wales is promoted internationally, particularly in relation to attracting tourism, and the role that Wales plays in delivering net zero and energy security. I want to thank our consul general in New York for facilitating an excellent set of meetings, and our ambassador in Washington, Dame Karen Pierce, for welcoming us to Washington DC. It was a great privilege to present her with a fine bottle of Penderyn whisky.

I will conclude on an area where I feel upbeat and optimistic this St David’s day—energy. Wales has an important role to play in helping the UK to meet energy security objectives and to make strides towards achieving net zero. Wales already has an enormous heritage when it comes to energy. In my constituency, Milford Haven has a history of 50 years of oil and gas processing and import. The opportunity in front of us is the launch of a brand-new industry—floating offshore wind. We have made great strides with fixed-bottom offshore wind in this country, particularly on the eastern seaboard of the UK. But with floating offshore wind, we can have bigger turbines, go to deeper waters where it is windier, get a better load factor on the turbines and create more electricity.

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14:06 Stephen Kinnock (Labour)

Learning the lessons of the energy crisis is essential to prevent it from happening again. If our country is to better protect itself, we must become more resilient and less exposed to fluctuating global energy prices. That brings me on to a topic that the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) mentioned: floating offshore wind. FLOW will be hugely important in allowing our country to stand more firmly on our own two feet. It will also be essential in helping us reach net zero.

The second decision is on the floating offshore wind manufacturing investment scheme. FLOWMIS is another vital building block of this game changer for renewable energy. The Welsh Government have already stepped up to the mark and provided a £1 million grant to help the transformation of Port Talbot dock, with a dry dock and other facilities necessary to provide the manufacturing capability for FLOW. It is time the UK Government followed their lead and urgently launched the FLOWMIS programme. FLOWMIS co-funding would demonstrate the UK Government’s clear long-term commitment to developing the ports and the sector, giving confidence to investors and other funding providers to back the project and unlocking sizeable private sector investment potential. I really hope that the Secretary of State will say something about FLOWMIS at the Dispatch Box today.

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14:31 Ben Lake (Plaid Cymru)

Before concluding, let me take the opportunity to raise an issue in the hope that the Secretary of State can use his good offices to look into it. We speak a lot in this place about energy efficiency and the need to decarbonise housing. In this cost of living crisis, with the current price of energy, there is a great deal of interest among the public in improving the energy efficiency of their homes. We should all be pursuing and supporting that. I am conscious that at present the flagship energy efficiency policy is ECO4—the fourth phase of the energy company obligation. Although I agree that retrofitting projects will have to play an important role in the broader energy efficiency mission, I am concerned about the implementation of ECO4 locally in my constituency.

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15:07 Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)

As I pointed out this morning, Transport for Wales has generated £2.5 billion of shovel-ready schemes to be delivered over the next 15 years—they are ready to go. I hope the Secretary of State will support me in calling on the Department for Transport to work with Transport for Wales and co-fund shovel-ready projects, to move them forward sooner rather than later. We want to increase productivity, we want wages to go up, and we want to deliver net zero, and that is vital.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon mentioned one of those projects, which is the cladding of homes to create their own power stations. There are also projects to dig up plastic waste from landfill and convert it into carbon nanotubes to be used in electric car batteries, medical instruments and mobile phones. There are projects to convert slag heaps from steelworks that represent billions of pounds of liabilities into billions of pounds of assets by a simple process using water, which converts them into iron ore, zinc and hydrogen. There are projects that take off-peak renewable energy that is currently not being used—the renewable energy that is not going into the grid at breakfast time and teatime—and convert it into hydrogen to be put into the gas grid, for instance, or into hydrogen transport.

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15:28 Jo Stevens (Labour)

In Wales, under a Labour Government, we are achieving some of the highest recycling rates in the world, which my constituents are very proud of, tackling plastic pollution and planting a national forest. Not only are our Welsh Labour Government taking action on the challenges of today; we are also looking ahead to the future. We have not banned offshore wind, and we have had no talk of fracking with a Labour Government who protect our Welsh environment for the sake of future generations. And our Welsh geography means that, as we have heard today, we are uniquely placed to be at the forefront of the developing floating offshore wind network, which will be vital to hitting the UK’s net-zero target. FLOW—as I now know it is called, thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon—is a massive opportunity for Welsh steel and to grow our supply chain in Wales, and we must do everything in our power to ensure that the supply chain creates jobs in Wales, boosting the Welsh economy.

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