(You know, we really should be numbering these posts)
The latest government initiative in their campaign to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich implement green energy measures is battery farms.
Landowners are being offered up to £50,000 per acre per year to have containers full of batteries sitting on their land. The current agricultural rent is about £120 per acre per year. Where's the money coming from? the government's Green Levy, i.e. higher energy bills for the likes of you and I. The best tax may be the tax that other people pay, but it's even better when they don't know that they are paying it.
The Music of George Orwell's 1984
29 minutes ago
11 comments:
Excellent spot! I gave up trying to number them as we'd end up in the thousands.
FFS - the only rational response.
Mark, I got to hear of it as my brother was approached by some agents on the lookout for likely sites. That's where I got the £50K pa figure from.
L, that was my initial reaction, swiftly followed by "this is one for the blog".
Thinking on... the sticking point here is not snapping up a few acres of farmland for £10,000 or so each, there will have to be a lot of unmarked envelopes being passed around the planning committee.
Given the NPV of £50,000 a year, even if they are very fat envelopes, there'll be plenty left for our landowner to roll around in.
Not so, apparently. The battery of batteries is only "temporary", so no PP needs to be applied for. All the infrastructure goes above ground and ground prep is limited to a bit of hardcore. However, you are right, agricultural land within spitting distance of a substation or a 33kV overhead line is suddenly going to be worth a lot more than £10K an acre, so long as it isn't boggy.
Bayard. Even boggy - just build a raft foundation. Not that costly.
Lola, but a raft foundation might need PP.
B. You could make the raft out of fascines, as they did for the railway across the Chat Moss crossing of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The greenies would love that. I bet that that method would not need PP. http://engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=1150
L, the interesting thing about the railway embankment over Chat Moss, is that, although it was heralded at the time as a great engineering achievement, using fascines was the standard method the Romans used for taking a road over boggy ground. I am told the same method was used to take the M5 over the Somerset levels after more modern methods had been tried and failed.
B Yep. I worked on a road scheme where expanded polystyrene was used to make a low weight embankment across boggy ground. It's a centuries old technique.
L, now that is fascinating!
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