but for the wrong reasons
Comedian Griff Rhys Jones said building a £25m solar farm near his Suffolk home would be a "folly" that would ruin the landscape.
Hive Energy wants to build a 43,000-panel farm at Tattingstone, near Ipswich.
Mr Rhys Jones said he feared a "gigantic change of use to farmland".
Hive said it would help provide the UK's energy needs and the solar panels would eventually be concealed by hedgerows and trees.
The £25m proposals would cover 95 acres (38 hectares) at Valley Farm near Alton Reservoir.
The company said it would generate 16MW of electricity - enough to supply 6,000 homes.
Cue much wailing about "loss of valuable farmland" etc by the usual suspects, which, of course, is complete b*llocks, the land being still there under the panels. Cue also cries of "NIMBY" from the other side of the fence. Well, possibly, but the real reason why this sort of thing should be stopped is that it is yet more rent-seeking, the profits to Hive Energy coming solely from money extorted from everyone else via higher energy bills.
What Griff Rhys Jones and Jeremy Clarkson, who also waded in against the solar farm, should be pointing out is not that 95 acres of Suffolk farmland is going to disappear under glass, but that a good chunk of the £25M to pay for it is coming out of our pockets. Meanwhile, in the winter, when the sun doesn't shine much, not even in Suffolk, we still need electricity, if not more so.
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9 comments:
bayard - and peak output will be during the day in July/August when power requirements are lowest in the UK
Broadly agreed.
In this instance, the NIMBYs are right. That they are right for the wrong reasons is in this case completely irrelevant. (They are even wrong to say that windmills are ugly, they are not).
More to the point, all the subsidies for windmills and solar end up going to landowners (because you need lots of space to instal them).
Absolutely agree, Bayard.
I have the same thing with Prince Charles. Even when I agree that he got the right answer, when you see his working, it's all wrong.
This could, of course, be reporting bias. GRJ could have said much about subsidies and rent seeking, but the meeja wished to present it as a NIMBY issue, bing in their eyes more newsworthy.
TS, "Even when I agree that he got the right answer, when you see his working, it's all wrong"
You mean, he dumped an absolute beauty in favour of an old horse faced hag instead for the wrong reasons?
MW,
Didn't she dump him?
Chuck was basically happy to have the public lie of marriage while shagging his mistress. It used to be that people joining the aristocracy understood these things: you provide an heir and a spare, then enjoy the trappings of wealth and the occassional cavalry officer while he shags other women. And you keep it all discrete.
TS, aren't you supposed to marry the old hag and then have a pretty young mistress on the side, not the other way round?
FWIW I know Tattingstone very well. It's a nice spot. And I worked on the Dam project.
But, that's still no reason not to build solar farms. The reason is that it is subsidy farming, not sun energy farming.
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