“The onshore wind ban has been in place for nine years,” explained the new Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, Ed Miliband on Monday. “We’ve been in Government for 72 hours, we’ve lifted it,” he boasted. Miliband’s hope is that the lifting of the “ban” is an essential step to the U.K. becoming “a clean energy superpower”, an aspiration which Miliband claims will lower bills. But this stands up to no scrutiny and tragically for Miliband was dashed within moments of his announcement by the very industry his agenda depends on.
The truth is that there never was a ban on onshore wind in England. The detail that reveal’s Miliband’s persistent lie was published by a Government Policy Statement, which refers instead to a “de facto ban” in the form of two caveats on development, one of which requires that “the proposal has proved community support”. This restriction on onshore wind farm developments was created by the Conservative Government after the issue of rural communities being blighted by wind turbines looming over them started to turn into an electoral liability.
To read the rest of this article, you need to donate at least £5/month or £50/year to the Daily Sceptic, then create an account on this website. The easiest way to create an account after you’ve made a donation is to click on the ‘Log In’ button on the main menu bar, click ‘Register’ underneath the sign-in box, then create an account, making sure you enter the same email address as the one you used when making a donation. Once you’re logged in, you can then read all our paywalled content, including this article. Being a donor will also entitle you to comment below the line, discuss articles with our contributors and editors in a members-only Discord forum and access the premium content in the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. A one-off donation of at least £5 will also entitle you to the same benefits for one month. You can donate here.
There are more details about how to create an account, and a number of things you can try if you’re already a donor – and have an account – but cannot access the above perks on our Premium page.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
When Milliband was last Energy Minister he oversaw the introduction of a scheme whereby you got paid a FIT, a ‘feed in tariff’ if you had solar panels installed. The payments were inflation linked & guaranteed for 25 years. Those of us with a south facing roof & the wherewithal to splash out on the panels have done very well. What’s more, not only do we get paid for every kWh we generate (about £0.65/kWh, adding up to about £3000/year currently), we also get to use the kWs so we don’t have to buy kWh from the grid.
For most users of the scheme they’re now making about a 25% return on their initial investment. It’s all paid for by other utility bill payers who either didn’t have a south facing roof or didn’t have a spare £12k to install the panels to start with.
All told it’s a kind of reverse Robin Hood scheme, money is collected from the poor & given to the rich.
This is the kind of inevitable outcome when you skew markets.
I have a friend who got in on this scheme and he admits to be doing very nicely, thank you, from it. His returns will be even greater because he fitted the panels himself.
My neighbour took advantage of the scheme when it started and now has a healthy supplement to her pension which sould see her through until she is in her 90s.
I self-installed panels so don’t qualify for FIT so donate my surplus power to the grid. I didn’t even get a thank you.
Maybe if they abolished Agenda 2030 and funding Ukraine they could give out free solar panels for those who would benefit.
So glad you are profiting from the money taken out of my pocket and the pockets of other consumers – doesn’t that make you in receipt of stolen property?
Labour governments are very good at using OPM to bribe consumers to see things their way.
See also PFI.
I can feel it coming in the air tonight
(If anyone has a proper video clip of this I’d appreciate a link.)
Just a reminder for people who never saw or have forgotten the advert based on the track.
Many thanks for the reminder. A brilliant advert.
A reminder too of when we had an advertising industry. Now all they can put out is multi-racial, woke drivel, memorable only for the fact that it is ALL totally forgettable.
I’m sure this Cadbury advert could offend someone if they tried hard enough.
RSPCA
Greenpeace
WWF
LGBTQ, plus and thingy
When did you last see an advert on TV with 5 white people in it? —tick tock tic tock tick tock.
2017.
I cheated and used the Interwebs – I’m not actually sure I saw it.
One thing you can say about wind turbines- I think you can still farm underneath them. We need a hell of a storage system which does not exist. There is Dinorwig in North Wales where they hollowed out a mountain, but how many places are suitable for this. Also (along with solar panels) they are not net zero. But we all know this. The thing I want to know though, why are so few new houses being built with solar panels on them? Seems a reasonable solution to me!
Great we (UK? Wales?) can use a hollowed out mountain to store energy in stored hydro power. ‘We’ can lead the world in this brilliant approach. An approach which won’t be followed in the Netherlands (for an example).
Anyway, isn’t the archetypal Bond villain supposed to hollow out a volcano?
It depends what you mean by “few”, but I’ve seen new houses being built with some of the traditional roof tiles replaced by some PV panels. Part of the problem may be that the house layouts are not optimal re. orientation to get the best out of it.
Dinorwig is quite small, but rapid in response to cope with unexpected increases in demand. I guess when it was built, there was an old nuclear station quite close by (Trawsfynydd), so it could soak up the surplus from it from time to time.
why are so few new houses being built with solar panels on them? Seems a reasonable solution to me!
In this area the grid infra-structure seems to have problems coping with bits and pieces of inputs from solar panels. They are looking for big solar farms that will then justify big new connection cables.
“One thing you can say about wind turbines- I think you can still farm underneath them.”
The only sort of farming I have seen beneath windmills is a few sheep and cattle.
“A reasonable solution” to what?
But why plaster a country in thousands upon thousands of huge Industrial Turbines that might only last 25 years, leave yourself with massive blades you cannot recycle and which are not really green at all, and only provide part time energy with no possibility of having base load, when a Nuclear plant tucked away in a corner in various places would provide all the electricity we need 24 hours a day, every day and will last 60 years? —–The reason is IDEOLOGY. We are governed by UN and WEF lackeys and there is no bigger lackey than the cretinous goon Miliband.
We’re not supposed to farm either, so that “plus point” is irrelevant.
Solar power is only useful when combined with a battery to store the power for at least 24 hrs.
I must say that was a very sage talk on Global Mafia Wins Election – UK.
https://windowsontheworld.net/live-shows/
Good article — I am also hearing on the News that ‘Cancers caused by smoking at all time high’…..How do we know the increased rates are from smoking?
That’s because the anti-smoker lobby hopes for more aggressive smoker bans, obviously. After all, a Labour government could pressured into introducing the ones so far and there’s now again a Labour government. I’ve been waiting for that already.
Good point.
Hmm… Wasn’t there a bill going through the UK parliament to ban sale of tobacco to people born after 31 Dec 2008? Which Party was in government then? Yeah, it might as well have been Labour.
The idiot Sunak proposed such a policy, but he got defenestrated before the nonsense could be drafted as a Bill and presented to Parliament.
This has meanwhile collapsed in NZ (or Austrialia, whereever it was introduced) because – not very surprisingly – it turned out to be impossible to implement in practice. But there are a lot of things which could be implemented, especially, yet more drastic tax rises.
Surely you’re not suggesting some other cause?
What a thought:-)
Because they might have to admit it has something to do with a particular ‘vaccine’ and denying people diagnosis and treatment during something we should all forget… move on… called ‘lockdown’.
That’s strange, when the proportion of people in the UK who smoke has gone steadily down since the ’60s and in particular since Blair’s premiership.
But it supports the proposed age-linked ban so facts/evidence are irrelevant.
As they say, you get what you vote for. My conscience is clean. It voted Reform or nothing because a sizable bunch of sceptics didn’t vote at all because voting is giving consent after all.
So the wholesale cost of ‘clean’ energy will go up and up, but since this is Climate Clown World of economics this means retail electricity prices will be halve as promised by Sir Kneel.
There’s a bit missing in the middle there…
Ah, silly me. The money will come from ‘the rich’. Sorted.
I am old enough to remember ‘taxing the rich’ by Labour – 83% top rate, plus 15% supertax on unearned income… only 99%… in the 1960s/70s but the rich had other ideas and exited to friendlier tax regimes.
I struggle to think what would lead to “undoing” other than voters get bored and fancy a change. You’d think Covid would have led to the undoing of all the mainstream parties but it apparently never happened. Anyway, after their 5 or 10 years in power they will be replaced by equally nut zero Tories so it makes no difference.
Let’s hope Farage can shake things up. In Parliament listening to the groans when he told home home truths about that EU stooge Bercow shows what contempt they have for patriotic people. I have said before that he’s not in Mark Steyn’s league or Neil Oliver, Fox etc, but he is better than nothing and I have followed him from around 2008 watching him in those interviews where he’s wiped the floor with these technocrats.
I think the voters missed their chance but hope I’m wrong
Only one Party promised to get rid of Net Zero, the majority voted for the Parties that insisted it had to be done.
Tragic
One of the few things we can look forward to from this Labour/Fabian government, the abject failure of some of their more deluded policies and ministers.
A policy doesn’t just work because you want it to work, even if you really really want it to work!
At least he twied
The PPE graduate [yawn..] who can’t tell the difference between a bacon sarnie and a kilowatt-hour. What qualifications does he have for performing this latest role? Roll on the next CfD auction…
Strange that PPE no longer teaches anything but economics from the perspective of bankruptcy. How to get there fast!
This appointment almost makes Claire Coutinho seem competent. From Order Order.
https://order-order.com/2024/07/10/new-energy-ministers-calls-for-mass-nationalisations-and-free-energy/
This is just nonsense predicated on a world that will never be. Just carry on arguing about the green agenda or the trans agenda. When it hits you it will be like a punch to an unconditioned stomach. Surely you can see that they are just pssing you about.
So Milliband wants further decimation of our wildlife by installing yet more bird/bat chompers. This is supposed to be ‘green’ and environmentally friendly?
When all the chemicals used in the production of the turbines are beyond their use-by-date and are buried in landfill these chemicals will leach into the ground and poison our earth even further.
Turbines and solar panels are more destructive to our plant than coal/gas/oil have ever been.
How infuriating. ————-I saw this article yesterday and could not wait to tear strips of this imbecile Miliband and the phony planet saving Labour Party but alas I could not login. I kept getting this message saying “could not connect to reCAPTCHa” and I spent the entire day “temporarily locked out of Daily Sceptic”———If any moderators are reading this can you please advise what to do when this happens.
Why tell the truth when a lie will do. The Labour gov’t has just spewed their first lie in their first 72 hrs. In office. Excellent start Kier. You have to wonder how many, many more lies we will be faced with. And now we have a secretary of energy and net zero. They just create titles as they see fit, because you sucker will pay their wages. The beginning of a very dangerous regime.
This is the most dangerous cretin in this country. This is the Eco fundamentalist that gave us the Climate Change Act (2008) that has seen electricity bills skyrocket as wind is the most expensive way to produce electricity. You will hear rabid climate change activists tell you that “Wind is now cheaper than Fossil Fuels”. If that is the case how is it that the countries with the most wind turbines in Europe (Germany, Denmark, and the UK) all have the highest prices? ——-The eco socialists and their bought and paid for media are the biggest bare faced liars on the planet.
This Edstone will be Labours Tombstone
‘It is almost offensive in its stupidity,’
There!
For some time I’ve been struggling for a sum-up phrase to describe a plan to commute – spot the analogy coming up – using a car you know will not start on 2 random days a week, requiring you to keep a taxi, meter running, on permanent stand-by,
The plan to rely on wind power is almost offensive in its stupidity.
The Ponzi scheme has to fail quite soon, and it will. The first day there are power cuts due to shortages, Millipede will be gone and the Labour Government will be finished. Today wind and solar are providing about 22% of our needs (a modest 30GW) and gas and nuclear most of the rest. Today we need 5 times as many turbines and solar panels, for a fraction of the maximum demand of the UK, about 55GW. Clearly this cannot work, ever as every acre of Britain will have to have wind turbines and solar panels, and on low wind days this is nothing like enough! Where is the plan of how this will work? I know, there isn’t one, it is all based on “averages” which are meaningless in the context of electricity supply. I wonder if anyone in the Government even knows this? If they do they are covering it up with plain ordinary deceit! Nothing new there then!
All of these green policies are predicated on the fact that burning fossil fuels generates CO2 which causes global warming and results in changing earth’s long term climate for the worse. Money & propaganda has been pushing this narrative for over 40 years. There are now thousands of the world’s top scientists that dispute these claims. Man Made Climate Change is a contested theory. Surely for something like net30, that will transform our world into ways unimaginable, that it would be advisable and prudent to really have an honest scientific based investigation and debate on these contested theories?
Does he have the power to do this Scotland as well? Or are we going to be impoverished by having to end N Sea oil and have our wonderful country further despoiled with wind turbines?