Last week, Ed Miliband approved One Earth, Britain’s second-largest solar farm. Spread across the Nottinghamshire-Lincolnshire border, it will have 740 megawatts of capacity and could power 200,000 homes. It followed approval for two more enormous solar farms, Peartree Hill in East Yorkshire and Dean Moor in Cumbria. [some emphasis, links added]
Britain is now carpeting farmland with glass panels at a startling speed, in pursuit of very ambitious solar power goals. All of which sounds worthy, even sensible, until you remember one salient fact.
A World Bank study ranks Britain second-to-last in the world for practical solar potential (only Ireland is worse); we are relatively dark, cloudy, and northerly.
Conversely, our mild climate and plentiful rain make us exceptionally good at growing grass and crops. We are therefore taking land that nature has optimized for food production and using it to harvest something much harder. It’s like Saudi Arabia converting oilfields into garden centres and watercress beds.
And the madness doesn’t stop there.
Take the 46 new Passivhaus homes in Andy Burnham’s Manchester, which recently created a ruckus online. They are apparently “award-winning”. They embody every piety of net-zero construction.
They also look like a meat-processing factory in unusually warm brick, mainly because their facades have tiny windows, slits, or no windows at all.
This is ideal if you intend to fend off a Viking attack, not so great if you like natural light or attractive housing.
Meanwhile, England is sweltering under record-breaking summer heat – yet regulations treat domestic air conditioning as a sinful last resort, begrudgingly allowed after everything else has been tried.
Only Britain could respond to global warming by making it almost illegal to cool down.
The list goes on. Importing oil while we prohibit new exploration in the North Sea. The £100m bat tunnel for HS2, which cost £400,000 per bat. The wood – yes, wood – we burn in power stations.
Sometimes it feels as if Britain has gone uniquely mad. And we are certainly exceptional in our readiness to impose painful and expensive sacrifices upon ourselves at the altar of decarbonisation.
Yet I would argue that we are not quite unprecedented. One society in history matches us in self-harming madness: the Aztecs of ancient Mexico.
When drought loomed, Aztec priests gathered children – some bought from the poor, some the offspring of nobles – and carried them up the sacred mountains to be killed. The priests liked the children to weep as they went, because tears augured rain.
Back home by the sunlit pyramids, Aztec lords mortified themselves, piercing tongues and penises with stingray spines, as a holy offering. Every 52 years, the Aztecs extinguished all the fires in the empire, just so they could kindle a new fire: in a human chest.
When the Aztecs sought to honour an allied king, the chronicles recorded, they would request his daughter as a queen. They would then sacrifice her, flay her, and invite her father to a feast at which a priest appeared dressed in her skin. The Aztecs were surprised when Dad was unchuffed.
Why did they do this? Because the Aztecs believed in angry climate gods. They decided the sun would burn out unless fed with blood forever. The apocalypse was perpetually imminent; only endless sacrifice could postpone it.
You see the parallel. We, too, are told the end is nigh unless we suffer, and the more we suffer, the better.
Read rest at The Telegraph
Hey Miliband, how much of the 740 megawatts capacity are produced during the few hours of sunlight high enough to generate electricity during the long dark winters? Although the sun is up a large number of hours during the summer there are frequent cloudy and rainy days during those summer hours. No matter what you will need real generating capacity during your cold and miserable winters since you are also forcing your citizens to give up their gas boilers for electric heat pumps and other such nonsense.