Carpeting Britain in solar panels is destruction for ideology (2024)

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When Ed Miliband last year posted a video of himself standing in front of a wind farm strumming a ukelele and performing a nasal rendition of the Bob Dylan song Blowin’ In The Wind before going on to extoll the virtues of renewable energy, it was easy to dismiss it as pathetic but harmless.

But – if you live near the site of a proposed wind or solar farm – the new Energy Secretary is anything but harmless.

Within days of taking office, Miliband has lifted the moratorium on onshore wind farms and given approval to three massive solar farms.

One of these, a 500-megawatt installation called Sunnica, to be built on 2,500 acres of farmland on the Suffolk/Cambridgeshire border, is close to where I live.

Remarkably, Miliband has ridden roughshod over the government’s own Planning Inspectorate, which last year recommended that permission be refused, citing the risk to ground-nesting birds and the loss of open countryside. And it wasn’t convinced the benefits of the plan outweighed the drawbacks, especially the loss of good-quality farmland.

Miliband has been forced into trying to speed up the development of renewable energy after committing himself to an over-ambitious target to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 – something he claims will save the average consumer £300 a year on our energy bills.

That would mean the gas power stations which provide nearly 40 per cent of our electricity would have to be either closed down or fitted with expensive carbon capture technology.

I have nothing against renewable energy, but there is little point in carpeting the country with wind turbines and solar panels until you have solved the problem of ‘intermittency’.

While we already theoretically have enough renewable capacity to power the whole country on a sunny and windy day in summer, in the winter it’s a different story. At times, wind and solar struggle to generate 2 per cent of our electricity.

The plan is for Sunnica’s solar panels to be married to a battery installation. That might help store some power for use in the hours after sunset but it will have nowhere near the capacity required to store meaningful amounts of surplus electrical energy generated in the summer for use in the winter.

Miliband’s claim that he will save us money is based on a false comparison between the long-term, guaranteed, index-linked prices offered to operators of wind and solar with the short-term prices we have to pay to operators of gas-powered stations to persuade them to fire up their plants for a few hours when wind and solar energy are in short supply.

Far from reducing our bills by £300, more renewable energy on the grid will drive the cost of electricity higher. This is because wind and solar farms will increasingly have to be turned off when they are generating too much power for the grid to cope.

Last year, each consumer paid £40 in ‘constraint payments’ to the owners of wind farms asked to turn off their turbines. That figure has been forecast to grow to £150 by 2026.

The Energy Secretary keeps claiming that his wind and solar revolution will create thousands of ‘green jobs’ – but for whom? It is the Chinese who are doing very well out of it. They now account for 80 per cent of the global market for solar panels and that share is bound to increase given that Chinese panels are half the price of European ones.

Some panels used in Britain, according to a study by Sheffield Hallam University, are highly likely to have been made by China’s Uyghur minority.

Then there is Miliband’s insistence that his plans will boost national energy security. That is questionable, given that we seem to be importing ever greater amounts of our electricity – more than 10 per cent of it during the past 12 months.

Moreover, as Miliband turns over more and more farmland to solar farms, where does that leave our island’s food security?

We have found good homes for wind and solar: the former in shallow seas off the British coast and the latter on the roofs of buildings. Indeed, I have them on my own roof. But plastering the countryside with wind and solar is ideologically-driven destruction – and for little gain.

Ross Clark is the author of Net Zero: How An Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (And Won’t Even Save The Planet).

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