Net Zero Watch

This month the Energy Secretary approved his third large solar farm in a fortnight, one of them on prime farmland across Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire that his own inspectors told him to refuse. They walked the site. They said no. He signed it anyway. So here's the grand plan. Take some of the best food-growing soil in England, ground that has fed people for a thousand years, and bury it under glass panels shipped in from China to catch the famous Lincolnshire sunshine. In a country where the sun knocks off mid-afternoon for half the winter and turns up for roughly eleven per cent of the year, we are concreting over arable land to harvest photons that mostly aren't there. A British solar field spends most of its life doing an impression of a very expensive greenhouse with the plants missing. The panels tilt hopefully at a grey sky. The soil beneath them, some of the finest in the country, sits in the dark for forty years quietly learning to be a car park. And it doesn't come back. Not in your lifetime. They are making a permanent decision about a temporary energy fashion, on ground you cannot un-glass, against the written advice of the men they pay to give it, in the same fortnight the same government swears food security keeps it awake at night. Sunniest idea they've had all year.

Do you agree with these people?

The control room engineers at the NESO balance Britain’s electricity supply and demand. If they don’t get it right, the lights go out and people die. This is, in part, why I have been approached by multiple whistleblowers from within NESO who are concerned that it is getting harder to keep the lights on in Britain. Few things can be more serious. As we saw in last year’s Iberian blackout, without electricity, people die. The allegations made to me are threefold. First, on 23 June, NESO failed to meet standards on constraints and reserves put in place to prevent blackouts. Second, the Corporate Affairs team interfered with operational decisions, prioritising NESO's reputation over security of supply. And third, operational decisions are being kept in ‘live documents’ with no audit trail, therefore preventing them from being accessed for Freedom of Information requests. It is undeniable that the system is becoming harder to balance. And yet, as of Monday, NESO launched an investigation into allegations of bad record-keeping and interference from their PR team, but it will not include whether control room operators think the system is being run securely. I understand that at an all-staff meeting yesterday, Fintan Slye, NESO’s Chief Executive, said “my” allegations were false. The problem is that these are not my allegations – they are the allegations of his own staff. If this remark was indeed said, it would be an extraordinary prejudgment of the whistleblowers’ concerns and would potentially deter other people from coming forward. Ed Miliband and his ministers, in a grotesque show of complacency, dismissed me as “scaremongering”. Ofgem, the regulator responsible for monitoring NESO, are seemingly fine taking a backseat role. As for NESO, their reaction has been to tell staff, who are so worried they have resorted to whistleblowing, that their concerns are false – rather than to seriously consider whether they have a problem. And who will be to blame if it all goes wrong? I fear in the court of public opinion it will be the control room operators, who do an enormous and increasingly difficult service for our country. That’s why I am fighting their corner now. They deserve to be listened to and to have their worries addressed. I can assure them I will not stop until that happens.

This is just more of the old nothing to see here nonsense On 23 June the system was outside the "safe operational limit" for extended periods and this was resolved only when "Emergency Assistance" was instructed on the interconnectors to France and the Netherlands The names "safe operational limit" and "Emergency Assistance" are relevant here. They indicate there IS something to see here Craig Dyke claims "no customer demand was disconnected". This is not true. EA on the interconnectors means you cut off interconnector demand ie you're cutting the demand of other countries Industry contacts tell me this has not gone down well in these other countries who think we should use our own reserves before cutting them off Blaming "adverse interconnector flows" is pathetic. Interconnectors flow both ways. Is NESO seriously saying it assumes they will always import to us?? Instead of half truths why not explain... 1. Why was the frequency so low for so long? 2. Was there any reserve left? 3. Why did they cut interconnectors before doing voltage reduction? 4. Why was there no EMN or Notice of High Risk of Demand Control issued that day? 5. Were any transmission constraints violated? 6. Would the grid have been secure if NSL or Viking, the largest infeeds, had tripped? These are simple questions. Let's have some candid answers