A solar energy company has gone into administration after racking up more than half a billion pounds in debt to a local authority in Essex. Bloomberg U.K. has more.
Toucan Energy Holdings 1 Ltd., which owns 53 solar farms across the country and was run by the financier Liam Kavanagh, had borrowed £655 million ($773 million) over four years from Thurrock Council to fuel its expansion.
In September, Rob Gledhill, the former leader of the council, resigned after the Government appointed a commissioner to take over the Conservative-led authority. At the time of his resignation, Gledhill said in a statement: “As Leader of the Council the political buck stops with me and as such it would only be right, and expected, that I resign as Leader of the Council.”
In July, John Kent, the council’s opposition leader, described the investments as “a scandal of huge proportions”.
Last week, Thurrock Council appointed administrators from Interpath Advisory, which has been tasked with selling off the farms to return cash to the council. While Toucan Energy Holdings 1 is in administration, Interpath said in a statement that the underlying parks were not, and would continue to operate as normal.
Mark Coxshall, leader of Thurrock Council, said in a statement that the move would “maximise recovery” for taxpayers.
You can also read about the collapse of the company in the Guardian here. Funnily enough, the author of the article is not George Monbiot.
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He also might have added “It’s just lucky that I was not in charge, because I would have done the same, probably worse, in order to out-virtue signal my political opponents and hopefully trouser a few kickbacks at the same time”
I guess this bankrupted non-firm, subsidised by me, printed plastic and debt; cannot send ‘reparations’ to the families of the child-slaves in Africa and S.A., used to mine the rare metals. I guess they can’t help in filling the gaping holes in mummy earth’s skin. I guess the green tards don’t care.
About as ‘green friendly’ as horse shit in the streets of my town.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/03/child-labour-toxic-leaks-the-price-we-could-pay-for-a-greener-future
https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complicated-legacy-of-rare-earth-mining/
I don’t think rare earths are used in solar panels – mainly silicon, boron and phosphorus. However new solar pv is looking to more exotic compounds featuring gallium, tellurium, cadmium and more.
The rare earth compounds are more popular in batteries and the very powerful magnets needed for high efficiency electric motors and generators (eg Teslas and wind turbines).
Depends on the solar cell, many do use rare metals
Solar panels are made up of rare metals and minerals which are mined from the earth. Photovoltaic cells utilise 19 of the rare metals. Due to solar panels production, there has been an increased demand for these metals, which means intensive mining would be required. https://earthfirst.org.uk/environmental-impact-of-solar-panels/
One could argue where they are mined for eg. China. Chinese slave labour is just as immoral as African. Then there are the chemical spill offs, the lack of recycling, the use of ‘carbon’ energy to build, transport and erect, the ecological damage, the lack of energy prod etc etc. Even the greentards are twisted and confused by it all.
Rare earth elements (as opposed to elements that are rare) are defined as:
Lanthanum
Cerium
Praseodymium
Neodymium
Promethium
Samarium
Europium
Gadolinium
Terbium
Dysprosium
Holmium
Erbium
Thulium
Ytterbium
Lutetium
Scandium
Yttrium
some authorities also include actinides
“Rare earth” is part of the name of the group.
Sorry to be pedantic but correct use of terminology is important in my opinion.
You are pedantic. Many solar panels use up to 19 ‘rare earth metals’ whatever that means. Some don’t. Some do. End of.
I’ll be interested to see how much the Directors took out in salaries & dividends. It takes a special kind of business acumen to bankrupt a solar provider when electricity sells for record highs.
I had a look at Companies House, Toucan energy was incorporated 22/7/20 with 100, £1 shares. It’s never submitted any accounts.
So, the registration was submitted at a time when most of the regulators would have been working from home. How convenient…
Pretty poor show in this day and age not to hit £1bn losses. Millions..? Who’s interested in those anymore..?
In this absurd drive to pretend to save the planet, government will chuck our money about like confetti. They throw good money after bad everywhere in this insane ideological group think madness. Desperate to be rid of the fuels that work and provide us with affordable energy (coal oil and gas), they continue this splurge of taxpayers money on energy that doesn’t work and is hugely expensive. They jet of to the junkets and pronounce how virtuous they are in the hope of getting a little gold star on their lapels from the UN planet savers. They are prepared to spend one and a half trillion on NET ZERO with no idea whatsoever how that nonsense can ever be achieved, in total disregard of the consequences for our well being or for the country’s finances.————-Who are these politicians really working for? It certainly is NOT US.
Have they ever worked for us?
Well done Essex.
I have discovered the Debt Management Office does not do any credit appraisal when giving loans to local authorities. Thurrock DC has just been taken over by Essex CC because it was unable to repay and perhaps not able to account for losses on almost a £billion of loans which it had poured into renewable energy schemes.
Seems the kind uncle ECC is just as culpable.
I anticipate similar losses at EFDC in due course over their retain property investment portfolio and its property development subsidiary Qualis.
I wonder how much is outstanding and irrecoverable from other local authorities.
Don’t worry, CHunt the chancellor is looking at increasing Council Tax. That increase can help
cover upsubsidise all the failed and hare brained schemes local councils enter into…There is a theme developing here.
Councils seem to be seriously involved in accumulating debt in a way outside the normal.
Oldham Council bought part of a shopping centre, that was already in dire straits (half empty), two years ago and paid 40 million for it. Money the Council didn’t have. Twelve months later a structural report on the roof itself basically condemns said roof. Cost of repairs one million. The plan is to turn the top floor in to Council offices – wholly impractical. Presumably the existing council offices will be converted to a hostel for the migrants we are importing.
Something deeply insidious is at play here.
My guess is insolvent councils will be taken over by central government and all the council assets will be sequestrated. They will also install their own “emergency” governing body.
The report I posted in NR about Ipswich and East Yorkshire Councils losing court cases which means that large hotels can effectively be taken over by Central Government tends to support the points above.
It is going to get a lot worse.
I may be somewhat naïve here but I thought that UK councils looked at the cost of running their manifest services and charged us, the local taxpayer a pro-rata amount based on our 1995 property values?
It seems they are also charging us for stumping-up seed-money on poorly researched (risky) investments? Cui Bono?
Also, the other side of this is the so-called Green Levy – which is also collected from scandals like that above? Again, Cui Bono – cos it aint me. I just see a one-way street of my taxes and levy’s disappearing for no real tangible result.
(addendum: sort of reminds me of all those charitable donations we are endlessly asked for to give to “Africa” i.e. £2 for water stand-pipes. By now, “Africa” should be underwater with the money raised and running taps. When has it all gone?)
This company won’t have just borrowed £655 million. It will have been massively subsidised by British households through the “green levies” scam.
Cheap, reliable, renewable energy – is just another lie by the Net Zero Eco Nut Jobs who infest Parliament.
More proof that this ‘rush to a green energy future’ is the biggest pyramid scheme in human history and we’re not only at the bottom of it, we’re almost in the tombs.
It’s at times like this that preople should be asking just where all this money can have gone. Do the people at Thurrock Council have so little idea what their £655 million should have been able to buy? If it went into property or hardware (solar panels etc.) then surely much of it should be recoverable?
However, the way that the story is emerging, it would seem that a significant proportion of the £655 million has been squirreled away elsewhere, in consultancy fees, management charges and other intangibles, including the bizarre revelation that £138 milion of Thurrock’s money never actually made it through to the solar park management company.
The story doesn’t mention the SFO taking any interest in this matter, which seems a little odd.At the very least, I would have expected to see that Mr Kavanagh had been expected to surrender his passport pending completion of plod’s enquiries.
From the April 2021 case judgment: “The case also attracted national press attention after it emerged that Toucan had raised very substantial sums from a local authority to refinance its investments The Judge found that the prospectus prepared for this refinancing contained “clear untruths”.” [H/T Brick Court]
Skimming through the April judgment, especially around paragraph 177, I was surprised that there was so much argument over the purely engineering concepts and definitions needed to agree whether or not the solar farms were or were not performing to the standards of the contract. Whilst large scale solar photovoltaic may be in its infancy, the engineering involved its not specific to PV and most of it, including the issues over lagging/leading power factors is well-established AC power engineering, and slip-ups over VAs versus Watts and all-day efficiency of transformers. It begins to look as though businessmen who are skilled at playing with millions of pounds on spreadsheets (and finding ingenious ways to game the subsidy system to their advantage) have a blind spot on important engineering aspects fundamental to the product. Perhaps they “leave it to the experts”, who unfortunately feeling their way. Then, when the whole project goes wrong the blame game starts and the lawyers are called in. The owner lost. It looks like the solar farm owner was trying concoct or exaggerate defects in the design and construction in order to win a case in law, when perhaps they realised that they had believed their own sales brochures and then were disappointed that solar farms are not magic money trees. Awkward things happen, like clouds and variation in load, inefficiencies of transformers when not working at maximum capacity, or tight constraints placed on when the farm may be connected to the (local) grid.
Two final points. First, the amount of energy generated was remarkably small compared to gas and nuclear. Secondly, whenever governments propose world-beating novel power systems or healthcare products, there is no shortage of entrepreneurs with a good patter line but little technical skill or morality who chase after the vast amounts of cash on offer to fix a non-existent problem.
The reality of ‘the Green energy revolution’ in two images:
Fifty three of these producing a maximum total of 513 MW – but only when the sun is blazing over all of them, and practically none when it is cloudy or during the night-time.
All funded by vast sums of money borrowed in the name of local residents / tax payers (how on earth does a local council ever get its hands on £655 million in the first place?).
And the whole scheme has now gone bust.
Versus one of these:
Cockenzie coal-fired power station near Edinburgh, which for 40 years produced a guaranteed 1200 MW (ie over twice the maximum – but hardly ever achieved – output of the above 53 solar farms) day and night regardless of weather conditions.
Though still going as strong as ever Cockenzie was not only closed in 2013 but in an act of utter industrial vandalism demolished shortly afterwards, all under the auspices of a completely fabricated pseudo-scientific agenda (Climate Change / Net Zero).
Future generations are going to shake their heads in wonder at the utter, utter folly of all this.
And don’t forget where the coal came from – Monktonhall colliery (at least in the late 1970s), just a few miles away. It didn’t travel very far. Up to 8 MGR trains a day, according to: https://www.railscot.co.uk/locations/M/Monktonhall_Colliery/ Plenty of cooling water available next door, so no cooling towers etc at Cockenzie.
Didn’t know these supply details, thanks for filling me in.
So the whole thing was a model of industrial efficiency which hugely benefitted all concerned, including large numbers of employees (hopefully conditions in mine would be ever improving) and public obtaining relatively cheap guaranteed electricity.
All destroyed by political, ideological and financial venality (and the Scargill led NUM has to take a share of the blame for its confrontational and anti-democratic marxist agenda)
What a waste.
And here is Lützerath, Germany, where an 8-windmill windfarm is about to be demolished to make way for…an open-cast coal-mine, urgently needed to solve Germany’s acute energy shortage.
Love the symbolism!
Anyway a government that is no doubt still under the Climate Change spell, but realises that its immediate duty is to provide guaranteed and affordable energy supplies for their population.
And meanwhile, in spite of the glimmer of hope offered by the incredibly brief Truss premiership (and I am sure that brevity had at least something to do with its relative Net Zero scepticism), the UK government is not only committing itself to vastly more relatively useless wind and sun farms, but refusing to allow access to the hundreds of years worth of easily obtainable fracking gas under our soil.
60,000 people died in the UK of cold-related factors between 2000 and 2019 (according to the government’s own Health Security Agency).
I wonder how many more of the most vulnerable are going to lose their lives in the coming months due to the much higher rates of fuel poverty which now exists, largely due to these quite deliberate policy decisions.
Taking that into consideration, plus all the raised mortality due to the Covid lockdowns, we are at least at the foot slopes of Soviet and Maoist type state engineered mass casualty catastrophes.
Speaking of the collapse, Jim Tucker, managing director at Interpath Advisory and joint administrator, said: “This is a significant portfolio of high-quality renewable generation assets which, as the UK accelerates its transition towards a green and renewable future, have an important role to play in the nation’s energy security strategy.”
However, whoever takes over the 19 crumbling solar farms will still face the problems that the original owner did: that making money out of them depends on getting the right government to impose the right operating regulations and the public’s tolerating huge electricity bills. And getting the right sort of sun at the right time.
A cynic might say that Tucker really meant that it’s an opportunity to buy it cheap through administration, and profit from it over the next twenty years. Why doesn’t the local Council do that, and maybe offset it against Council Tax? At any rate, as long as it’s still in working order, someone will make a killing out of it.
I cannot believe that a very small portion of these vast sums do not find there way back to those approving them. They are human after all. Nobody is that altruistic or that foolish and nobody resigns that easily. The enormous sums involved in the climate scam are a driving factor.
What a racket.
Why are local councils doing ‘investments’?
They’ve got a relatively simple job — they take money from their local residents and use it to fund their local activities. Instead they seem to think of themselves as ‘businesses’ with all sorts of clever schemes to make more cash. Of course, actual businesses are unlikely to get involved with such schemes as they actually do know how to run a business, unlike these local councils that are just playing (the problem of it being ‘with other peoples’ money’ makes this easier for them).
This wasn’t helped by central government lending money to local councils at below market rates — this might be sensible for local regeneration schemes but not for the types of investment illustrated in this article. Indeed, by investing beyond core activities they change the market dynamic. I don’t really agree with them buying up things like shopping centres — while this might be allowed under the ‘regeneration’ banner, they are in reality using government money to prop up commercial real estate — with all of the risk being placed firmly on the residents, not the individuals doing the ‘investment’.
This just shows us what the pathetic net zero government agenda causes. I wonder how much of the grants offered by the government has been siphoned off, before taxpayers are faced with this cost.