The new Government has made a number of big-splash announcements about how it plans to change Britain. To its supporters, this shows Labour “hitting the ground running”. Labour has claimed that 1.5 million new homes will be built between now and the next election. Ed Miliband has nodded through three large, controversial solar farms and declared he will “unleash a U.K. solar rooftop revolution”. Some are concerned that the Government’s green zeal will turn prime agricultural land into deserts of silicon. But what are the actual footprints of such developments? Do these plans have any chance of succeeding? And are fears about their consequences groundless alarmism?
Labour’s plans for this gigantic home-building effort were originally unveiled in October last year. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, reiterated this promise last week, albeit characteristically without any detail. As many have observed, building 1.5 million homes in five years requires 821 to be completed every single day. Or 1,150 a day if these poor builders are going to be allowed to take weekends off.
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The big difference between green power production and everything else, Hinckley point C can add to the grid whenever needed!
Cover the whole of the uk in solar panels and you get zero energy at night, winter, even worse.
Yep—–Coal Gas and Nuclear are on demand energy. Wind and Sun are part time diffuse energy solutions that cannot provide base load. But government do not care. Steve Holiday (Former head of the National Grid) warned a few years ago “We are going to have to get used to using energy as and when it is available” Welcome to the 21st century Eco Socialist vision for us all————-Energy as and when it is available, and we have just elected a labour Government with the cretinous goon Miliband who will make sure that is exactly what happens.
Preaching to the converted, I’m sure:
Hinkley Point C will not be ‘easily turn off-and-on-able’ (to borrow from an energy advert from a few years back). Sure, it and its siblings can produce a regular baseload demand.
The hope would be that solar and wind can top it up to meet peaks in demand… except that if we’re relying on them to top up the nuclear baseload and the sky is cloudy and the wind is light we still need something else ‘easily turn off-and-on-able’. Probably gas.
It’s an interesting engineering challenge, however much of my frustration comes from the fact this is being managed as a political challenge, when we all know the laws of physics has no care for politics. The way the UK energy market is constructed is basically flawed, loading the dice in solar and winds favour.
I don’t see why we shouldn’t use these energy solutions if we can, however the market should force a wind farm or solar farm to also have appropriate controlled storage between it and the grid – they could then sell what they actually know they have into the grid and National Grid could manage and plan accordingly. Problem is, no such tech at scale exists yet, unless you have a mountain and a lake at the top and the bottom… a la Dinorwig, which was built primarily to balance the grid, not as a primary generator. Thinking back to the CEGB days, we were in a much better place, even though it was considered a bureaucracy – it did actually work
Just to add – I know some people who used to work for the CEGB, and the difference was it was run by engineers, not politicians…
It is pure politics that is forcing coal and gas out of the energy market. The Politics of Sustainable Development that insists that the wealthy west give up reliable affordable energy first because we have already benefited from it to become prosperous. The excuse for this is “climate change” which is mostly evidence free junk science and modelling that does not match what the real world is doing.
The likes of Hinkley Point will normally operate at “base load” with agreed revenue 24/7, as did the old Hinkley A, then B, Oldbury, etc. At least the interconnections with France etc widen the market; it’s almost certain that import that way from there is nuclear output from EDF.
In between the old coal fired ones like Didcot A were split into 4 chunks with 500 MW each, and of course hydroelectric achieves the most rapid response time.
As to solar PV, I’m familiar with a domestic set up, and the output is pretty variable as the light intensity varies under cloud, so it needs to be damped down by other things overall to maintain stability.
Sorry, didn’t mean to preach, but
I didn’t actually say on and off, it has to be kept running by its very nature but the upload to the grid is adjustable.
Coal fired plants are similar, they have to tick over when not needed whereas gas ,to a point, can be switched on and off.
Green energy can never do any of this, its either there or it isn’t, unless of course you provide acres of battery backup! not very likely
Green energy should be the backup to Hydrocarbon sources not the other way around!
I meant that I might be seen to be preaching to the converted
Sorry mate, misunderstood
I don’t understand how we can have geo-engineering creating cloud cover to protect us from the sun and solar power at the same time. Surely the one affects the other adversely?
Nuclear needs to be always on, its not at all suited to being turned on and off. You can do that with Gas and Coal but it destroys any economy of scale and makes them more expensive than they should be, so the Zealots can say its more expensive than their vanity project solutions.
“probably gas”???? ———–NO Definitely gas. ———-Gas and coal are the only 2 that can top up anything. Wind and sun cannot reliably top up anything, unless you are lucky that day or it isn’t the night time. ——-Green ideology is Alice in Wonderland solutions to a largely manufactured climate crisis.
Pumped storage like Dinorwig is being used more and more as a top up as well I’ve heard, even though it was never really intended to be used for that at large scale
as it was more for energy frequency support (TV pickup of old) or to compensate for other plants tripping out. In theory it’s an example where a surplus of wind or solar could be used during the day to replenish the ‘battery’ (ie pump water back uphill), if only we had another 100 suitable sites, and 100 years to build them it could work… sadly we don’t.
if anyone finds themselves in the Lake District and at a loss, a visit to that plant is a cool day out for the engineering geeks amongst us – free as well if memory serves.
No idea of the cost (estimated by the grid to be in the trillions) and no idea if their fantasy can be achieved at all, never mind by 2030 or 2050. ———-But why would you want to do this anyway and why the rush to have it done at break neck speed? Even if the phony climate crisis is indeed an emergency, it is a global one, and nothing we do in this country will make the slightest difference to global climate, which even Tony Blair admitted a couple of months ago.
——-Notice when you point out to the eco bureaucrats that their folly won’t save the planet at all, they immediately switch away from planet saving to nonsense like “We need to be world leaders in the energies of the future”. Or “We need to give businesses certainty so they can invest in Green Technology”. What they mean by that is that we have to bribe them with 100% subsidy skimmed from the taxpayer because no one in their right mind would ever build solar farms or wind turbines because they are DUMB ENERGY and totally uneconomical. Why do you think your electricity bills have virtually trebled since we started getting rid of coal and gas and using renewables? Because you are not just paying for electricity, you are paying for all the turbines and panels, all the smart meters etc etc. Then the providers of this part time wind and sun won’t settle for anything less than way above top dollar for their hopeless product which cannot provide anything like base load. Then the eco fascists like Miliband will try to tell you that “Renewables ae now cheaper than fossil fuels”. The biggest bare faced lie ever told. They are pricing fossil fuels out of the market with absurd mandates and environmental regulations while heavily subsiding their favoured wind and sun. Is it any wonder wind and sun look cheaper. But even then their argument falls flat as wind and sun require 100% backup which has to be factored into the cost and storage technology does not exist, and even when it does it will cost way more than the energy it is so supposed to be storing. ———-People you have been warned. You are now living in an eco socialist dictatorship and you will soon be cursing the fact you put that X in the Labour box
I do like these arithmetic based analyses.
The business with the size of the solar farm has missed a trick though: While building Reevesville just make sure every home has a south facing roof and has its own solar panel and battery backup. There, problem solved… except that it isn’t, of course. 1.5m roofs (ignoring blocks of flats/apartments which reduce the number of roofs/household) each acting as it’s own microgenerator being synchronised into the grid requires a lot of electronics. 1.5m independent bits of electronics with no unexpected interactions between them? No feedback loops or waves? I don’t think so.
I’m a keen recycler. I separate my cardboard and paper and wash, crush and separate my plastics, tins, bottles (lots of those) from my non-recyclable waste. I use my domestic hot water to rinse out all this stuff to stop the bin smelling and attracting flies. All these items get rinsed in clean water heated by my paid-for energy. Of late, I wonder whether, if multiplied across all households, the energy used (wasted?) to produce the clean warm water to rinse the recyclables would add up to more than the ‘environmental cost’ of collecting the stuff more frequently and washing it on an industrial scale.
It’s probably just as well that most households don’t worry about washing the stuff quite so much.
In Australia, there are too many rooftop solar homes. The plan is to charge those that supply electricity during peak-sun.:
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/05/solar-power-at-midday-is-so-useless-they-plan-to-start-charging-homeowners-for-generating-it
OFF- T. UKC. The Day Of The Skripal.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/the-day-of-the-skripal
On a point of detail, why chose an example site in East Anglia. Have you seen the Barratt biz developments already around most cities, towns and villages there.
Why not give an example in the Red Wall area or in the north?
Why not in Scotland, which has low density and few immigrants. Even better, a Eurocentric government should look at Ireland, France or Poland.
Oh trust me,Ireland is getting plenty of immigrants!
But not the housing strangly enough
So did Barratt start building these on 5th July? Every single one will get claimed as a Labour policy success.
Many of you will have a similar solar powered water feature. Mine is a big bowl, pump, jug three small bowls affair. When the sun is out, it is pleasant to sit on the deck and read or talk. At a highly ramped up guesstimate that fountain works 1% of the year even though it is in a position where it should get full sun until at least 2 in the afternoon.
Then there is the factor that, on average, there are 110 days, that’s over 3 months, of the year in the UK when the Sun / Wind / both are not sufficient to generate enough for an LED.
One is an observation, the other is a researched fact. Why doesn’t Mad Bacon take lessons on grown up thought processes? His ideas are the definition of unbelievably stupid and ill thought out. Anything he says can only ever come true in a book that nobody ever reads.
The logical conclusion is that they, the politicians of most flavours, are OK if the lights go out.
I do think the sheeple will not react well to blackouts however, it’s not the 70’s – cut the power now and the modern world stop’s.
On a positive note – social media will disappear for a bit
As to the 1.5 million homes, ask Prescott how many New Labour knocked down and how many they built. In Yorkshire alone they knocked down 250,000 perfectly okay homes. They built a Grand Total of Zero.
And then we have the many derelict Victorian Terraced houses that could be renovated, they are well built. The Amazing Spaces guy did a documentary on them around 2011 where he met with David Cameron — I don’t think it came to much.
I would like to see an analysis of placing solar on hill farms with south facing slopes for their grazing land. PV cells on windows sounds like a good idea.
I always wonder where the jobs for these new houses come from. They’ve built a huge number in Rugby yet most of the industry has closed down.
You know how unreliable Windows is, don’t you?
Oh… I see.
A very timely post.
Germany is “defending democracy” again. Now they have banned Compact Magazine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXvuJQFJCbY
The German SPD home secretary Nancy Faeser has been doing that in her capacity as member of the most wildly unpopular German government since 1949 (excluding the GDR).
Imagine that: You’re living freely in a liberal democracy where “censorship does not take place” (wording from the German constitution) but the home secretary has the power to outlaw any organization he doesn’t like at a whim. Of course, being the home secretary, he always uses this power very wisely and only outlaws really evil organizations. Such is the nature of the freedom the so-called “victorious powers” of the second world war consider just and proper for Germans (the laws this is based on ultimatively come from allied diktats from the late 1940s).
Complaining about this obviously doesn’t help. But these conditions deserve to be known much more widely.
If the author checks the Biodiversity Net Gain requirements as from February this year it will be clear that about double the area he calculates will be needed.
Intermittent supply for constant demand – genius
I would recommend people read “Green Breakdown – The Coming Renewable Energy Failure” by Steve Goreham. Just nearing the end.
It has a lot of good information about the realities around costs, scaling and impossible targets for the absurd concept of “De-Carbonisation” and Net Zero.
We have a solar farm near us, the panels as would be expected face the sun.
My question is, if the country experiences heavy and prolonged snowfall, presumably the snow builds up on the panels and the sun cannot, if it elects to come out, shine on the panels. Who clears the snow off?
Some ‘green job’ opportunities.
Government have just banned zero hour contracts – I’d say that’s a great application for a zero hour contract, who’d be a ‘snow clearer’ full time in UK
There are ways to add heaters etc to melt this, however it’s for climates with more reliable snow – in UK I’m sure those energy providers would just say ‘sorry, no leccy today’ if prolonged snow happened. Of course it would likely be freezing conditions, so of course we won’t be wanting more ‘leccy in that scenario would we to keep warm…
I have 14 395w panels on my roof
395w x 14 panels = 5.5wkh. In summer over 8 hours I should be able to generate over 40kw.
I’ve never achieved over 30kw in a day and for the winter months I’m lucky to 5kw in a day sometimes as little as 2 or 3 kw. The thing that makes it viable is battery storage and the opportunity to buy electric cheap overnight to top up my batteries.
I sell electric to the grid when I produce too much and buy electricity at the same price overnight.
It works for me and should make a return on investment over 7 or 8 years.
However battery capacity falls over time, 60% or less of plate capacity after 10 years.
The PV panels also degrade over time and become less efficient, so nationally there will be a need to constantly be replacing panels and batteries.
Solar can be okay with battery back up in a domestic settling, but it’ll never generate its plate capacity, ever, in Northern Europe and Britain.
For national infrastructure it’s a complete waste of time, money and natural resources.
Maybe we can use Lady Hallett’s comment on the need for red teams to avoid group think!