Cameron’s Green Energy Poppycock
Energy
The ‘green energy austerity’ of this government is a political choice. It’s not driven by logic or economics, but ideology.
Around 1,000 jobs were lost last month as one of Britain’s biggest solar companies went into administration – a direct result of the government’s slash and burn of green policies. There’ll be more to come as the impacts of recent announcements begin to bite.
The irony is that this came in the same week as a new report, from Bloomberg, confirmed that renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy we can build. This is the latest of many reports that show just how illogical the government’s approach to energy policy is, and just how much the renewable sector has to offer.
Around 25% of the UK’s power now comes from renewable sources – an indigenous energy supply that creates no pollution, is immune to global commodity price rises, enables us to hit climate change targets and creates jobs and industry right here in Britain. (more…)
Guest Blog: The Slow but Assured Death of UK Renewables
Energy
We’ve been a bit busy recently and haven’t been able to blog about this dire situation but Jonathon Porritt wrote this one, which pretty much sums up exactly how we feel about it. Reproduced here with his permission. Thanks Jonathon.
Things go from bad to worse on the renewable energy front.
1. Even those who are accustomed to George Osborne’s hostility to the renewables industry were astonished by his announcement in the Budget on Wednesday that renewable energy would no longer be exempt from the Climate Change Levy – this being one of the measures the Government uses to discourage the use of fossil fuels! This will cost the industry £3.9bn between now and 2018. Shares in renewable energy companies plunged.
In almost the same breath, Osborne confirmed further subsidies for oil and gas companies operating in the North Sea. And it is understood that there will soon be further measures to encourage the use of fracking. (more…)
A letter to Green Party supporters
EnergyHere’s a letter we wrote to the Green Party, thought it might be of interest to contextualise our Labour donation.
Hello everyone,
To say this has been an interesting, even challenging week, would be an understatement. We’ve had a lot of response to our support for Labour and I think to many people it’s been either hard to understand or misunderstood. I wanted to try and explain that better here. (more…)
David – don’t break wind!
Energy
Just a quick post to share a couple of things we’ve been sent, firstly there’s this petition/campaign which is amusingly titled (borrowed for the title of this post) but is very serious and worth supporting : David Cameron: don’t break wind…support it!
Then along similar lines, there’s this letter to David Cameron penned by one of our customers. We really liked the tone and content and thought it would be worth sharing in case any of you would like to do something similar with your MP, or even to Mr Cameron.
It starts with a letter from our customer Chris to his MP David Cameron:
Are we really quitting on England?
Energy
If you had only read the headline and the opening paragraph of an interview I did with The Times recently “Windfarm owner quits over political interference” (Tuesday 25th November), you may get the impression that Ecotricity is giving up on England.
It’s not quite what it appears. I’m happy to say.
We’ve had a policy in place for some 12 months now, to stop finding and submitting new wind sites into planning in England and instead to focus our efforts on Scotland – for the reasons set out in the article, it’s become very difficult in England, to the point that we were wasting time and money to a degree we could no longer accept. (more…)
Brave New World turns into 1984
Energy
It looked like a Brave New World when Feed-in Tariffs were announced last April – the opportunity to build large scale ground mounted solar projects – something not uncommon in other parts of Europe, but absent in Britain.
We’re building the UK’s very first Sun Park right now, next to our big Wind Park in Lincolnshire and it should be up and running in April. But it might be the UK’s first and last, if the government delivers on the rhetoric of the last few weeks.
Ecotricity has over 50MW of Wind Parks now, with about 200MW more in planning – it’s taken us fifteen years to get here BTW. We see the potential to build enough Sun Parks to achieve a 50/50 mix of wind and sun – in as little as two years time – because solar projects have none of the planning problems that onshore wind does. And these two sources of energy are complementary, for example you get more of one in the winter and more of the other in the summer. And we’re expecting to learn a lot, as an energy company, from one of the world’s first hybrid Wind and Sun projects (the first project we’re building). It’s very much a Brave New World. (more…)
Hoodie Hugger meets Tree Hugger
Energy
I met the man himself last week, in Reading at our Green Park wind turbine – David Cameron was in the ‘hood’ doing local political stuff and asked to have a closer look at our mill – so I showed him round. I’m glad I did.
We talked about the 1,000 homes the turbine can power every year and other bits and pieces (more…)
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