By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
England faces being carpeted with solar panels covering an area close to the size of Exmoor under plans being considered as part of Boris Johnson’s green energy drive.
The Prime Minister is preparing to meet with chief executives from the renewable energy industry on Thursday to encourage them to boost production as Europe fights to wean itself off Russian oil and gas.
Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, is understood to be pushing to more than triple the UK’s solar power capacity by 2030 as part of this proposal – adding an additional 36 gigawatts of energy, equivalent to solar panels taking up around 225 square miles of space. Exmoor National Park covers 267 square miles.
The proposals –which are likely to focus heavily on the South of England, where solar radiation is higher – risk sparking a wave of public resistance and are already concerning Tory MPs.
Matt Hancock, the Conservative MP for West Suffolk and former health secretary, who also served as an energy minister in 2014-2015, said: “I am in favour of solar and have supported numerous projects, but it has to be in the right place.
“You lose the community’s support for solar if you try and squeeze it around villages rather than putting it on rooftops or further afield.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/03/29/england-faces-
Net Zero Watch have already responded:
Net Zero Watch has warned Boris Johnson that the proposal by business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng to hugely expand the UK’s renewables fleet would precipitate the energy cost crisis and ruin lives.
While the government is struggling to agree a new energy security strategy, Kwasi Kwarteng is reported to be proposing a tenfold expansion of solar power, a fivefold increase in offshore wind, and a threefold increase in onshore wind, as well as a small increase in the nuclear fleet.
Net Zero Watch’s deputy director, Andrew Montford said:
The capital cost alone would run to £10,000 per household. This is an insane proposal at a time when households are already struggling with a doubling of the cost of their energy bills.”
And Dr John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s director of energy said:
On top of the capital cost, Mr Kwarteng’s plan would cost billions of pounds of operating costs, and billions more to keep the grid functioning. This is not the kind of proposal a serious politician would put forward”.
We all know about the enormous problems surrounding the intermittency of wind power, but what about solar?
Leaving aside the obvious problem that you need battery storage for use at night (who will pay for that, Mr Kwarteng?), nobody seems to have worked out that we get virtually no electricity from solar farms in winter, when demand is greatest.
In December 2021, for instance, solar output was a paltry 185 GWh. This equates to just 248 MW. Total solar capacity was 13500 MW, which means solar was working at just 1.8% of capacity:
https://www.solar.sheffield.ac.uk/pvlive/#
Kwarteng’s 36 GW of new capacity will be add just 0.6 GW in the middle of winter. The simple reality is that we will still need to back all of this up with proper power stations.
And we’re going to spend £36 billion on this nonsense?
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
March 30, 2022 at 05:54AM
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