As the energy crisis and price inflation continue to bite – driven to a large extent by Net Zero carbon dioxide policies – the Government is set to give the green light to six new North Sea oil and gas fields, in a sign that some ministers at least have their heads screwed on. The Telegraph has the story.
Six North Sea oil and gas fields are set to be given the green light this year, The Telegraph has learnt, as Cabinet figures push back against “insane” demands to go further on net zero.
Rishi Sunak has asked Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, to fast-track the licences amid Treasury fears over the economic impact of making the UK a net zero carbon emitter by 2050. …
The six oil and gas areas, which have already been given a preliminary licence by ministers, are expected to be given approval by Britain’s oil and gas regulator to begin construction of rigs in the North Sea.
Despite calls for all domestic fossil fuel extraction to be halted, ministers have pledged to continue to support oil and gas production while renewable energy sources are developed.
Drilling of oil and gas could begin in the Rosebank field, to the west of Shetland, and at the Jackdaw, Marigold, Brodick and Catcher sites in the central North Sea. A sixth site, Tolmount East, had been intended to be approved by the Oil and Gas Authority last year but is now expected in 2022.
The combined reserves of all six sites are thought to be enough to power the whole U.K. for six months, with 62 million tonnes of oil equivalent fuel in the ground.
A Whitehall source told The Telegraph: “The Business Secretary is pushing for more investment into the North Sea while we transition – not just for jobs and tax revenue, but for domestic energy security.
“Kwasi is actively resisting insane calls from Labour and the eco-lobby to turn off U.K. production. Doing so would trash energy security, kill off 200,000 jobs, and we would only end up importing more from foreign countries with dubious records.
“Over the long term, we need to generate more secure, affordable, low carbon power in the U.K. to achieve greater energy independence. The more clean power we generate in the U.K., the less exposed consumers will be to gas prices set by international markets.”
Worth reading in full.
It comes as the first experiment in the National Grid rationing household power usage at peak time to ease pressure on energy infrastructure gets underway.
Households will be paid to ration their power usage at peak times as the National Grid scrambles to reduce pressure on Britain’s energy infrastructure.
From Friday up to 1.4m households will be paid if they cut their normal electricity consumption at certain two-hour periods during the day, as an experiment to see how households’ behavior might be changed.
The move is a pilot scheme intended to pave the way for a broader overhaul of the country’s billing system as the U.K. ditches reliable but dirty fossil fuel plants.
Officials want to encourage people to charge cars and use appliances at different times during the day and night to reduce the pressure on the electricity grid and limit the amount of new capacity that needs to be built as demand for electricity grows.
Worth reading in full.
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“The U.K. Doesn’t Have Enough Workers to Build Labour’s 1.5 Million New Homes”
I have made this point numerous times here on DS in the few months that Ranting has been spouting this nonsense.
And Brexit has F A to do with any of this.
I seem to recall that when free movement kicked in there was a rush of trades from the east to come here and make their fortunes. I dont have an axe to grind about the quality and hard working nature. We had some Polish and Lithuanian builders and they worked like trojans, and delivered good quality, but they also undercut local trades and depressed the market for new trainees. Since a lot of them went home, counting their cash, it seems to have left a bit of a shortfall of good locally trained tradesmen.
And the pressure on young people to go to university rather than learn a trade to meet Eminence Blair’s proclamation that 50% of school leavers must go to university, as well as shutting down the polytechnics.
Many of them were sending their money back home so effectively exporting money from the UK economy. Remind me again how immigration benefits us?
Not only that, many were claiming from the British Welfare State …. child benefit and probably Tax credits … for children “left behind” in their own country. No proof of said “children” was required.
We used to be sending One million pounds per month to Poland in Child Benefit payments. Presumably that has increased somewhat in the last ten years.
Few went home.
Yes. The law of supply and demand kicked in. They imported hundreds of thousands of foreign construction workers who were able and prepared to live in houses of multiple-occupancy and who could therefore undercut British construction workers who had to earn enough to pay for their own house/family.
So young people, who might have considered going into one of those trades, worked out that their income would be inadequate to provide a reasonable standard of living and made alternative choices.
Socialism is all about process not outcome. Quotas must be set, fulfilling them isn’t what’s important.
The solution is surely obvious, import 3 million foreigners skilled at building the mud huts which are all we’ll be allowed anyway.
We won’t need electricians because there’ll be no electricity.
Indoor bathing and central heating also a no no for net zero compliance so no plumbers needed either.
I love it when plan comes together!
In all probability.
Yet again the useless leader of the opposition was on television this morning, spouting on about being an engineer. I don’t know why this makes her a better politician than anyone else, but look at her back story and she is no more an engineer than Reeves is an economist. Why does every speech and interview include this tripe, it’s as bad as father was a tool maker
Prefabs were built quickly after WW2. They lasted decades and people liked them.
True, and some of them still exist, albeit modernised to some extent depending on the local weather etc. However, they were probably not planned to do that. Even five year plans are too short term for most politicians.
I spent a lot of my state education in temporary classroom huts that were there for decades. I had a spell at a private school and there were none there.
And the Luftwaffe had thoughtfully cleared the land ready for construction.
Agreed. But ‘the Regulations’ wouldn’t permit such buildings nowadays. Single glazed steel frames, lack of insulation, use of asbestos panels and roofing.
Now if you were to give me the job (you would be daft) of providing so many houses quickly I would opt for wooden framed houses with brick or concrete block/render outside skins. The wooden frames could come pre wired and pre plumbed to reduce the skills demand. At a site near me they built the roof structure on the ground and craned it on to the house which was probably safer and quicker.
First job: build the factories to produce the component parts in the quantity required. And that will take some time too. And we will need lorries and JCBs too.
It wouldn’t surprise me if prefab type houses are used to get over this ‘problem’. They can be built in China, shipped over and fitted to their concrete bases, job done. Not much skill needed to join them up to sewerage etc – similar to park homes.
Correct. It’s the only way they will possibly be able to deliver the dwellings they have “promised.” That, or Static Caravans/Park Homes.
Agree, John. And of course modern pre-fab housing would be much better than those old pre-fabs were. New materials are available that weren’t even dreamed of then, no reason why they shouldn’t have double glazing and good insulation and so on. We build houses by having bricklayers build them with tiny bricks stuck together with glue (mortar) rather as if they were being built with Lego – surely we can do better. The whole construction system needs to be rethought – and what’s more, I bet someone has already rethought it somewhere in the world.
But we do have enough workers to build thousands of wind turbines, solar installations and thousands of miles of high-tension transmission cables, pylons, interconnectors?
And it’s not just the labour resource, it’s raw material/component supply, manufacturing, transportation, and there’s another thing… can’t quite think of it… oh yes, capital, money – tax, borrow, print money, I suppose.
The trouble with Socialists is they have no clue about economics and how an economy works… well no clue about anything – if they did they wouldn’t be Socialists.
“But we do have enough workers to build thousands of wind turbines, solar installations and thousands of miles of high-tension transmission cables, pylons, interconnectors?”
No.
For the same reason, I wouldn’t be too concerned about electronic control matrices and the like just yet. Watching my own employer scrabble globally to recruit Control and Instrumentation Engineers has been eye-opening.
Such people are essential for the design, construction and maintenance of such things.
Wot no highly skilled cultural enrichers available?
And no ships to lay subsea cables until after 2030.
So, we could build the numbers of houses promised if we had enough skilled people.
So, we could build the numbers of windfarms promised if we had enough skilled people.
So, we could build the numbers of solar farms promised if we had enough skilled people.
So, we could build the numbers of EV charging points necessary if we had enough skilled people.
So, we could build the necessary power distribution infrastructure if we had enough skilled people available.
But many are working on the HS2 vanity project, extended by Labour.
And then is there are enough concrete, steel, copper, project manager, capital etc.
No sign of joined up thinking here.
(Simultaneously posted with JXB comment)
Details, details…
It’s come to something when an industry is so bad that it spawns companies like “New Home Quality Control”.
But then builders aren’t builder any more, they’ve joined the banks in the industry of finance. Much easier to import cheap labour than train your own.
We hear the complaint that builders are ‘sitting’ in land – so-called land banks. Nobody gives thought to why behind the usual low intellect “profiteering” waiting for land values to go up.
No thought is given to availability of ressources to build, or the Byzantine planning rigmarole… except for wind and solar subsidy harvesting farms.
Some of them are. By us there are going to be 1700 houses and enormous sheds. Been waiting for developers to agree S.106 monies. Don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to settle.
These legalised thefts of money by councils – S106, CIL etc. – are all costs to developers. Having had to sign a S106 myself on selling my house to a developer I know that no money is paid until the ground is broken, by which time I had sold and gone so was not for me to pay.
With the open borders and the 1 million African-Muslim invaders each year, surely, pace the fake news and propaganda, most of these men are engineers, brick layers, plumbers, plasterers, carpenters etc ?
We should be drowning in skill trades people according to the no-borders cult?
A lot of them seem to be pretty handy with bladed instruments, so there is that…
Carpenters then?
Butchers more like…
Now watch the floodgates open even further to let in all and sundry pretending to be a much needed tradesman so they can build houses for their buddies pouring across the border.
Then we’ll need even more houses, so we will need to import even more builders…etc ad infinitum
My thoughts exactly
Weird that. Who would have thought that the decline of traditional apprenticeships would lead to skills shortages?
As for all the other technical projects from which we are to “benefit”, who do they think is going to physically do all of this?
There is a shortage of STEM graduates, not to mention craft trades.
After all, electrical engineering is harder than “Decolonisation of Interpretive Dance” or some of the other “degrees” being offered nowadays…
Today’s university fodder graduates to be late-entry shelf-stackers.
If they’re lucky. It isn’t a stretch to say that shelf stacking could be done by a robot. Many large distribution depots now use robotic pickers to retrieve stock for shipment when it is ordered.
Again though, PLC-controlled, so needs the aforementioned C&I engineers/techs to implement and maintain.
Meanwhile the Education Blob is salivating at the prospect of changing the school curriculum (England and Wales), ridding it of colonial influences, etc. Naturally a review has been launched, but we can sleep easy, because it is “expert-led”. Yes, umpteen Profs of the Sociology of Education will decide the outcome.
Will they be consulting with the construction industry on increasing the supply of toxic males into the building industry?
Oops
Brexit nothing to do with it. We had been importing at rates far above what they say they need and few went home.
We get that many people across the channel in a year +\- Trouble is they are completely untrained.
Undoubtedly lockdowns drive many out if work and no new tradesmen were able to learn.
Given the claims by the elites that immigrants are better people than us the 900,000 bet extra last year and 700,000 year just ended means they can build their own houses in double quick time.
Shame we can’t make bricks or windows.
… “few went home”? Where I was living at the time a lot of Poles went home, not sure how much of that was misrepresentation of Brexit and how much was COVID.
So they need to build 821.9 homes per day and since the Student Union took over they should have completed 109,315 houses. About the only way they will get near the target is by building flats which may well be popular with the incoming immigrants who will occupy them.
…and all those flats will have to be heated by air source heat pumps? Where?
We seem to have enough “economically idle” people around to start training up, but that may take some time – 3-5 years?
And they will be trained by whom, exactly?
Can’t some of those Graduates in Critical Studies retrain as plasterers or carpenters… don’t they know a hawk from a handsaw?
… not enough workers?
Not if they bring in more immigrants…
It’s a bit like the plan to build Nightingale hospitals when there were obviously not enough doctors, nurses etc to staff them.
We desperately need politicians who have some basic common sense and intelligence which seems to be in extraordinarily short supply in the Tory, Labour and Lib Dem camps.
Being labour, they’ll start by recruiting a thousand DEI staff to make sure all the new workers are of the correct colour, their experience is irrelevant!
And who are all these homes for ?
Numbers don’t seem to be a speciality, with this lot….are these the fruits of down grading Maths in school.
Dummies In Charge Of The Toy Store…. & The Toys, Are Humans.