Large scale ‘solar parks’ will swallow thousands of rural acres and are an expensive way to pursue unrealistic net zero goals.
Fears that a Labour “super-majority” might turn our parliamentary democracy into a parliamentary dictatorship are fast being realized. [emphasis, links added]
Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero has ignored the recommendations of the Planning Inspectorate and ridden roughshod over local democracy by granting development consent to a massive solar “park” that will swallow thousands of acres in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.
Other schemes in Lincolnshire have also been approved.
And this is likely to be just the start of Labour’s assault on the countryside as other solar industrial complexes, battery “farms” and their connecting scars of pylons wait in the wings, as well as onshore wind.
We may look back on it as the opening barrage of a doctrinaire campaign to hit unrealistic net-zero targets, notably the absurd aim of decarbonizing the grid by 2030.
Labour wooed rural voters during the election with warm words about food security. Yet this decision alone could increase our import requirements by the equivalent of 21 million loaves of bread per year and risks increasing food prices as we rely on volatile world markets.
The old Labour slogan “for the many, not the few” will also sound hollow to the homeowners whose blighted houses may lose value without compensation and to the agricultural workers who could lose their jobs.
Make no mistake, this is a transfer of wealth from the many to the few – to the landowners, Chinese panel manufacturers, and renewable investment firms.
Hysterical green arguments are used to excuse this authoritarianism, but there are many more effective and less damaging ways of reaching net zero.
The UK has over 600,000 acres of south-facing commercial roof space to put solar on, for example. Solar is less efficient in cloudy UK anyhow and we would do better renting a patch of desert somewhere for it, given that we all live under one atmosphere.
Invisible power generation by anaerobic digestion of sewage and animal slurries (which could also greatly improve water quality in rivers and on beaches) is under-exploited. And then there is small-scale nuclear.
This Government (and indeed its Tory predecessor), has made very little effort to pick “low-hanging fruit” – renewables with the least impact on society.
Renewables provide the opportunity for rebuilding our infrastructure from the bottom up, with a series of micro-grids. Instead, they sided with the producer interest and sought to load extra electricity onto a National Grid designed in the 1920s for very different supplies and demands.
They have planned net zero from the top down.
Miliband’s determination to inflict relatively inefficient solar on rural communities is reminiscent of the post-war Labour government’s vindictive resolve to dig up the parks of stately homes in pursuit of coal.
Historians are likely to view this in the same light. To the rest of the world, our dogmatic self-harm must seem like Enver Hoxha’s Albania and its “go-it-alone” communism.
Miliband has picked a fight with rural communities and may be surprised by the strength of the backlash.
His latest decisions seem likely to be sent for judicial review, so the taxpayer will be hit with legal costs now, as well as higher food and energy prices in the future.
Read more at Telegraph
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