Image credit: MIT
Industrialising the countryside is now deemed a plus for the environment by climate obsessives, including the government. Solar power is ineffective in UK winters, when electricity demand is often at its highest during the long hours of darkness anyway.
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Drawing on new data from the solar industry the campaign group Net Zero Watch has revealed that an astonishing 37,000 MW of land based solar PV capacity is in pre-planning.
If built, this would take 150,000 acres of farmland – or 75,000 football pitches – out of production at a time when Britain has less farmland in use than at any time since 1945, and is losing such land to industrial and other uses at the rate of about 99,000 acres a year, increasing import dependency.
Solar energy should not be permitted to add to this serious problem.
However, due to weakness in the planning guidance, little or no protection is offered to ordinary grades of farmland, encouraging landowners to think they can easily secure the conversion of food producing fields into building land. The misrepresentation of land quality in the planning system is suspected.
Net Zero Watch has recommended an immediate and firm revision of the planning guidance to protect the national interest by changing the presumption in favour to a presumption against solar development on any land, leaving the developer to prove their case on its own merits.
Dr John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s Director of Energy, said:
Farmland is already a renewable energy producer, making food from sunlight. Sacrificing that national asset to produce low quality electrical energy from Solar Photovoltaic panels is foolish in itself and will have deep and troubling long-term implications for British food security.”
Source here.
Net Zero Watch: Solar energy and the threat to food security [pdf]
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
[…] Gargantuan solar farms threaten UK farming and food security […]
If built, this would take 150,000 acres of farmland – or 75,000 football pitches – out of production
The pdf points out that only a percentage of initial plans will get to, and past, the official planning stage and get built. But that could still be quite a lot of course.
football pitches …. aye. what size are they now ? Anyway, saw a prog from Alpen Lands last night, – all that talk about glaciers melting, lack of water( snow) but they are building houses for the tourist trade, using up valuable land – robbed from the flat valley floor. Yes Hypocrisies everywhere. Food is more cheaply produced abroad. I just about cry for the wretched souls who sweated Blood, sweat & tears, Years ago, to clear the land that we might live better. For those that Fought for the Land, etc. and this morning I think about the Post Office folk who were wrongly jailed and lost a lot ( more than our 2 years of Covid imprisonment ). And yet the MSM keeps promulgating current government dogmas. ( fed up , too, hearing about the Ukraine) – and the scorn heaped upon the Canadian and other Truckers and like-minded protesters. Yes, I am on record for saying MANY TIMES that Farmers should consider whitholding food from those who choose to wreck their livelihoods. But then again they are just Peasants, let them eat cake – they grow plenty of weet.. Why did I spend so much of my life learning and teaching good practical Agriculture and Engineering. … but well now, even the Big Tractor people are developing driverless machines and working around the Solar panels would fit in nicely with their agenda.. It’s been a bright January up here, but February has been less mild and darker – only clearing at night. How long can we all hold our breath before the giant inhalation will burst our Belt n braces ?
Ten years ago…
A 2012 Environment Ministry report showed that German taxpayers pay an extra four billion euros per year on top of their electricity bills to support solar power. [bold added]
https://phys.org/news/2012-05-germany-weekend-solar-power.html
What plan is there for disposal when they get decommissioned ?
What is the effective operational life of the panels ?
Watched a news piece from Alan Jones in Australia, stating that they can’t be recycled and reported that 38,000 tons of panels there, had just gone to landfill !
If so, will there be issues of toxic contamination of the soil & water table over time.
Not just solar panels what about EV batteries. He also reported that maybe 5 kilos of lithium salts could be extracted from a Tesla battery and the rest goes to landfill.
Also on a side note, what happens to all the 100,000’s of lithium batteries used in the current ‘flimsy’ vacuums we have to use now since the EU banned the use of better electric plugins ?
Hell its only a small country and we don’t have any desserts to dump this waste in.
Who’s going to pay needs to be sorted out before anymore is installed.
More rent seeking billionaires.
Oops I meant “Deserts” not the cake kind 🙂
‘If built, this would take 150,000 acres of farmland – or 75,000 football pitches – out of production’
Pardon me, but this assertion is silly. NZW/CFACT has not identified the land in consideration. They don’t know how much is farmland and how much is useless scrub.
This sounds like Benny Peiser, not John Constable. Peiser loves to make emotional and moralist arguments concerning climate mania. Though with good reason. You aren’t going to beat the Left’s sanctimony with facts. But emotional exaggeration is risky.
As that acreage represents just 0.6% of the total farmed acreage I’m not going to get too worked up about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Kingdom
I wouldn’t mind but there are thousands of rooftops not producing anything other than heating the loft!
[…] farms, is it? Just to put that Johnson exhortation about alternative energy into perspective, read this report in Tallbloke’s workshop. Apparently the green blob, Johnson at the front, seem to think that we […]
Ever wondered who dreams up this crap and gets it turned into govt policy?
Who let the dogs out? That’s the subject of a Whitehall probe into the recent Afghanistan debacle. When the Taliban took Kabul, an estimated 1,200 people who qualified for evacuation to the UK had to be left behind. But on 28 August, waiting Afghan families were left helpless on the ground as 173 cats and dogs were escorted past them into the airport and off to safety. The big question: on whose authority were animals put ahead of humans? And did any of this have the Prime Minister’s backing?
As ever with Johnsonian drama, the truth is elusive, but one minister seems closer to it than others. A parliamentary investigation unearthed an email from Zac Goldsmith’s ministerial team within the Foreign Office declaring that the PM had ‘authorised’ the animal evacuation. The minister continues to deny responsibility. But it fits with messages from Trudy Harrison, the PM’s then parliamentary private secretary, offering round-the-clock advice to those leading the animal rescue mission. So what does Goldsmith know? And what, if anything, does this tell us about the Johnson operation?
The affair also raises questions about the role of Carrie Johnson, the Prime Minister’s wife. Her friend Dominic Dyer, an animal welfare campaigner, was involved in the Afghan pet rescue and boasted at the time he had ‘no doubt that Carrie was in on this as well’. It was instantly denied. Understandably so: it was an incendiary claim, suggesting that Mrs Johnson was part of a powerful but informal group quietly shaping Tory policy and (in this case) military strategy. It’s too ludicrous to be true. Isn’t it?
Zac Goldsmith occupies his own stratum in the Tory hierarchy. He’s stonkingly rich (he is probably worth more than half the cabinet members put together) and when he lost his seat to the Lib Dems in the 2019 election he was quickly ennobled and shifted his brief to the Lords. He is a minister not just at the Foreign Office but at Defra, where he helps shape environmental policy and pursues his high-regulation agenda. To some free-trade ministers he forms part of a protectionist ‘axis of evil’. He’d call it standards.
Who’s running this country?
Goldsmith, now 47, is the original vote-blue, go-green Tory; a millionaire who saw conservatism and environmentalism as bedfellows long before David Cameron started to champion the idea. Animal welfare has always been part of his conservationist package. Cameron helped him secure a place in parliament, winning his home constituency of Richmond Park in 2010. But Goldsmith always had his own, green agenda. Soon after taking his seat, he hired an ambitious young woman to help him forge his path: Carrie Symonds, now Mrs Johnson.
When he resigned as a Tory MP in protest at the Heathrow expansion and stood as an independent, it was controversial among Tories. But not with Carrie. She ran his 2017 re-election campaign and among those out leafleting were her friends and future power-brokers Henry Newman and Josh Grimstone. As so often in politics, the friendship circle moved upwards together. Newman is now a senior adviser at No. 10; Grimstone is Michael Gove’s right-hand man.
There is something of a ‘Zac Pack’ at the heart of government. Goldsmith’s former council leader, Nick True, serves alongside him in the Lords, while True’s daughter Sophia works in No. 10 (as does her fiancé, Declan Lyons). Then there’s Ben Elliot, the impeccably connected nephew of Camilla Parker Bowles and incumbent Tory party co-chairman. When the Prime Minister’s wife wanted some expensive new wallpaper for No. 10 in the now-notorious redecoration, the establishment fixer was there to help.
Elliot has spoken in the past about how his life has been ‘intertwined’ with that of Goldsmith, a fellow Old Etonian whom he has known since childhood. Elliot’s parents were best friends with Lady Annabel Goldsmith; the boys started prep school together. Boris himself boasts ‘a longstanding personal friendship’ with Zac, who let the Johnson family stay for free at his £25,000-a-week holiday home in Marbella in October: just rewards for the man who gave him his peerage and first ministerial job. As with so much in Goldsmith’s life, the ties are ancestral: his uncle Teddy was a friend to and fellow eco-enthusiast of Johnson’s father Stanley.
Many on the right fear that the environmental agenda clouds Johnson’s focus. Goldsmith’s fellow peer David Frost suggested last week that No. 10 is in hoc to a ‘woke’ green lobby. The Prime Minister has previously been happy to indulge such a faction, as part of his preference to run his administration as a series of competing courts. But now, mired in scandal, his hand may be forced to engage in some bloodletting. Some in Johnson’s party want an overhaul on policy, with net-zero initiatives sidelined until cost of living pressures are lifted.
For Goldsmith, the trade-off is false; ‘vote blue, go green’ was never just a slogan for him. The peer’s belief in conservation is sincere, hereditary and central to his political mission. His tycoon father Jimmy nurtured his interest with a copy of Ancient Futures, a classic text on the dangers of globalisation. Zac later recalled: ‘He scribbled in the cover “This will change your life”. And it did.’ In the words of activist Derek Wall, ‘Green politics in Britain is branded with the Goldsmith logo and fertilised by Goldsmith seed funds.’ Zac’s uncle Teddy helped found the Ecologist, which Zac went on to edit, and the People party, a forerunner to the modern Greens. Environmentalism and Euroscepticism were the two causes of Jimmy Goldsmith in his final years, and both were taken up by Zac with relish.
For the past half-century, the fortunes of the Goldsmiths have been linked to both the Aspinall and Birley clans. These three fabulously wealthy families have long been influential in the Conservative party, with shared interests in animal welfare and greenery. Goldsmith’s half-brother Robin Birley owns 5 Hertford Street, a fashionable political hangout. Until recently Zac served as a trustee of the Aspinall Foundation, a conservation charity. Its head of communications is Carrie Johnson.
Ben Goldsmith has meanwhile served on the board of his brother Zac’s department Defra since 2018, having turned the moribund Conservative Environment Network into a powerhouse over the past decade. Its ideas become Tory policy with striking speed. Some 120 MPs and peers are involved in the caucus, and it has something of a revolving door with Defra, where two of its alumni now work as special advisers.
There is one final piece in this green machinery. When the pet rescue was activated, Dyer boasted — perhaps unwisely — about the involvement of a group of Tory activists. ‘Carrie Johnson took the message forward,’ he said, ‘not just through me but through the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation.’ This Foundation has, as its patrons, both Zac Goldsmith and Mrs Johnson — as well as Stanley, the Prime Minister’s omnipresent father.
Was this group, between them, capable of giving a helping hand to the team behind the Afghan pet rescue? Absolutely. Did they? That’s a question for the inquiry. Goldsmith, for his part, has said that he did not speak to the Prime Minister about the affair. But he wouldn’t need to. He has far better connections.
How good is solar power in the winter when we need most energy?
oldbrew, I assume those solar panels in the picture are somewhere on the equator by the angle they are set at, certainly not in Germany. There they need to be set at an angle of approx latitude + 15 degrees.
Alan, not all of the unused roofs are pointing south nor are they at the optimum angle as I mentioned above beside which there would need to be a massive restructuring of the local supply to carry the over voltrage necessary to push the generated electricity back to the grid. That over voltage is quite capable of causing over heating and burnout of many electrical appliances. That is before we get to the problem of storing excess power generated at noon to have it available in the evening when it is needed.
Twitter soft censorship alert. This tweet got over 1.6k likes and 700 retweets.
it’s not really a problem. By the time it gets done building and installing, millions will be dead from the clot shots delayed killings. Food demand will be down enough to even it out.
ivan – the pic in the comment was in the linked report about Germany but was taken by a US firm, so it could be an American solar ‘farm’.
FOLLY
incarnate