[Tubby Isaacs]

In today's "bears shit in forest news", pylons are much cheaper than the alternatives.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ore-costly

Labour endorsed the report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), which found underground cables were on average about 4.5 times more expensive than overhead lines.

In some cases, burying the cables is vastly more expensive. For example, a typical 15km-long 5,000MW overhead line was estimated by the report’s authors to have a build cost of nearly £40m, while an equivalent underground cable would cost about £330m or, in a new tunnel, £820m.

Not just more costly, vastly more costly.

I know Lincolnshire is the best county for Kippers, but I think it's going to test the theory that "you beat them by doing good stuff" is going to be tested to distraction there. Mark Carney dropped some climate policy to see off Pierre Pumpy Pants. If he felt he needed to do that with Trump talking about the "51st state", I fear how much traction Farage could get here. I suppose Canada is an energy producer, and that sort of politics is an easier sell there. Even so, I wonder.

[Abernathy]

Not only are underground cables much more expensive to install, but hugely more expensive, and inconvenient, to maintain, mainly because you have to dig the fucking things up again.

[Killer Whale]

Not only are underground cables much more expensive to install, but hugely more expensive, and inconvenient, to maintain, mainly because you have to dig the fucking things up again.

One of the reasons they're more expensive to install is because you have to build in the mechanisms to make them easier to maintain. You're double-dipping on your criticism there, to an extent.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Yep.

Another "Pope is Catholic" style revelation here. Economies of scale are a thing with solar farms.

https://www.ref.org.uk/attachments/arti ... ration.pdf

Here's a Lib Dem MP (by coincidence with a large proposed solar development in her constituency).

We need urgent action to cut our carbon emissions and boost the amount of electricity we get from clean energy sources.

However, there are good ways of doing this - like Max's Bill – but also bad ways, like the massive Lime Down solar park proposal that destroys our countryside, disrupts communities with no benefit to them, and pours profits into companies registered in offshore tax havens.

The good way is... spending far more money, and somewhere else. The cost of which won't fall on private school parents of rich landowners, or businesses paying extra NI.

Where ground-mounted solar panel are necessary, let’s make that development small scale and community-led, or on brownfield sites closer to large urban and industrialised areas that need power.

No firms in with parents in tax havens will do any of this, of course.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Does she really believe energy should be generated near where it's used? The good folks of Snowdonia must use a lot of energy, seeing they built Dinorwig and Trawsfynydd there.

[Crabcakes]

I genuinely don’t get the opposition to solar farms. Sure, don’t chop down woodland to put one in, but is a neat, orderly, ground-level array of panels really far, far worse than dirt?

They won’t be put on the best grazing or growing land because - shock, horror - it is better used for growing or grazing. They won’t be shitting out toxic fumes. They won’t even be killing the occasional bird like a wind turbine.

NIMBYism is the absolute fucking worst.

[Killer Whale]

Something I don't understand. I've had it explained to me why gas sets the price for electricity and think I understand it. Marginal pricing, the price of every input is set by the most expensive (gas, for the foreseeable). Or something. I've also read that this might not continue. I don't get that.

It's not that the price is set by the most expensive per se, it's that the price is set by the most responsive, the last to be switched on. Which in the UK is always the gas turbine power stations. This is what they were designed for right back in the days of coal base-load. Of course, they're also the most expensive.

It's a sledgehammer system that could potentially be replaced by a more tariff-based system such as that used in France which is designed to incentivise certain usages, but is also notoriously complex to navigate: When I worked for a Belgium-based consultancy, they actually employed a specialist tariff analyst because mere mortals could have their brains fried just by thinking about French tariff matrices.

[The Weeping Angel]

In today's "bears shit in forest news", pylons are much cheaper than the alternatives.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ore-costly

Labour endorsed the report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), which found underground cables were on average about 4.5 times more expensive than overhead lines.

In some cases, burying the cables is vastly more expensive. For example, a typical 15km-long 5,000MW overhead line was estimated by the report’s authors to have a build cost of nearly £40m, while an equivalent underground cable would cost about £330m or, in a new tunnel, £820m.

Not just more costly, vastly more costly.

I know Lincolnshire is the best county for Kippers, but I think it's going to test the theory that "you beat them by doing good stuff" is going to be tested to distraction there. Mark Carney dropped some climate policy to see off Pierre Pumpy Pants. If he felt he needed to do that with Trump talking about the "51st state", I fear how much traction Farage could get here. I suppose Canada is an energy producer, and that sort of politics is an easier sell there. Even so, I wonder.
[/quote

Which climate policies were these? Morgan Jones has written a piece for labour list warning about learning the wrong lessons like they did in Uxbridge.

[Killer Whale]

They won’t be put on the best grazing or growing land because - shock, horror - it is better used for growing or grazing. They won’t be shitting out toxic fumes. They won’t even be killing the occasional bird like a wind turbine.

You can run sheep under them. In climates such as those on the English downlands, there is some suggestion that grass quality is better under the partial shade of the panels.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Thank you. that makes good sense.

Surprised we don't hear more about a new system. Even though it would create some winners and losers, hard to see how it wouldn't reduce costs to the consumer.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I genuinely don’t get the opposition to solar farms. Sure, don’t chop down woodland to put one in, but is a neat, orderly, ground-level array of panels really far, far worse than dirt?

They won’t be put on the best grazing or growing land because - shock, horror - it is better used for growing or grazing. They won’t be shitting out toxic fumes. They won’t even be killing the occasional bird like a wind turbine.

NIMBYism is the absolute fucking worst.

Useful income for farmers too, which I thought was one of the "real issues".

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Not only are underground cables much more expensive to install, but hugely more expensive, and inconvenient, to maintain, mainly because you have to dig the fucking things up again.

We had this debate a few years ago in Normandy, when EDF were planning a new service to Spain. The local Pas Dans Mon Jardin crowd (as well as the anti-nuclear campaigners) mounted a huge campaign against pylons, which got nowhere, due to the cost differentials. EDF/Rep Française just got on and did it in the end. The pylons are a bit of a sore thumb, I much prefer the windfarms, but I suppose you get used to them.

Incidentally, did you know they helicopter the pylons in, fully assembled? Impressive to watch.

[Killer Whale]

Incidentally, did you know they helicopter the pylons in, fully assembled? Impressive to watch.

Not in the UK. In Norfolk they'll be installed out of the back of a white transit by Jeff the Scaffold and his mate Denny from down the pub. Bish, bash, bosh, a couple of twists of the ratchet spanner, and the job's a good 'un.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Not that he matters any more, but a spectacularly unhelpful intervention from Tony Blair.

Climate plan based on phasing out fossil fuels doomed to fail, says Tony Blair
Former PM claims net zero policies losing public support and says there should be greater focus on carbon capture

Labour have a big carbon capture fund already. What's he talking about?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ir-climate

[Killer Whale]

At some point we have to get serious about the technologies that are proven to work *now*, not rely on magic beans from the future.

[Boiler]

There was a piece about pylons vs. burial on Farming Today this morning;

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002bhlc

9:25 in.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Tories (Andrew Bowie) sound cock a hoop. Though may be not as cock a hoop as Ed Davey.

It seems even Tony Blair has come to the realisation that Keir Starmer and the Labour party’s mad dash to net zero by 2050 is simply not feasible, or sustainable.
As Ed Miliband’s net zero zealotry pushes this country’s energy security even further into the arms of China, and their slave labour supply chains, and risks driving up energy bills further and further, only Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives are telling the truth about energy policy in this country.
Under new leadership, we have been clear that the cost of net zero by 2050 to families will be far too high, and we must urgently change course. Will Labour now finally be prepared to do the same, and put the national interest above their own ideological dogma?

Note the obvious bullshit that renewables are bad for energy security. Nice concern for human rights though, which are famously never an issue in fossil fuel producer countries.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Does this "Keir Starmer mad leftist zealot" stuff really work? I've worried that it might on the other thread, but equally it could polarize voters usefully towards Labour and the Lib Dems, with Greens competitive in cities.

[Boiler]

Talk of energy here. Andrea Jenkyns spekes her Branes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp8jrjgpgjgo

[Tubby Isaacs]

Green Party candidate, with the usual "big things are bad, maaaaaan". I swear, they' not say any different if they were being paid by Exxon Mobil as part of a double act with Farage, where one tries to make renewables really expensive, and the other says fuck it, too expensive.

Sally Horscroft questioned the use of large developments and said they should instead be built on top of wasted spaces, such as supermarket car parks. "It should be incorporated into all new residential and industrial buildings and retrofitted where we can," she said.

The Labour candidate doesn't go quite as far, but he's not very helpful to the government. They're never going to win this, Waveney Valley, South Cotswolds or anywhere else with a proposed big development. They might as well put up candidates who'll take one for the team.