Environment and Climate Change Committee
3 November 2026
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Environment and Climate Change Committee House of Lords
Follow its sittings00:02 - 01:55
Speaker 3
Good morning and welcome to the Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee. Today is the final session of our inquiry into Dunkelflaute weather events and the challenges they present to the government's ambition to deliver the clean power action plan by 2030. And I'd like to warmly welcome the right honourable Michael Shanks MP, the Minister for Energy, together with his colleague in DESNZ, Bill Jones, Deputy Director for Future Energy Security. Thank you very much for making the time to be with us today. Before we start, may I remind everyone that the session is webcast live on Parliament TV and that a transcript will be taken and made public.
Witnesses will have an opportunity to review the script and, if necessary, make very minor amendments. Members are reminded that they should declare any relevant interests the first time they speak. And I'll take the opportunity here to say that I am a director of Peers for the Planet. So I think we're a little bit late starting, so we will move straight to the first question. So Minister, in written evidence from DESNZ, we are told that the, and I quote, "majority of capacity procured through the capacity market can be expected to generate or manage demand throughout a Dunkelflaute period in combination with other non-capacity market eligible capacity".
So in that statement, we can infer that the government has some idea of how they are defining a Dunkelflaute period. Could you share that definition with us?
01:55 - 02:11
Speaker 1
Well, good morning. It's good to be on this end of the building. Thank you for inviting me along. I think you've had some very detailed evidence. I read the session you had with the Met Office, for example, on scientific definitions, and there is a real mixed picture of exactly how you would define it.
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