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.

NESO leaks to Coutinho on the dire state of the grid remind me of leaks from Foreign Office and intelligence services to Churchill in the 1930s on aircraft production for the Luftwaffe and the woeful state of the RAF. Their significance can scarcely be understated ...

I have been contacted by more whistleblowers within our grid operator. They allege the electricity grid is not being run securely, which increases the risk of blackouts, with a particularly severe event on 23rd June. This information is also allegedly being hidden from the public. This morning NESO refused to deny that Corporate Affairs staff had interfered in operational decisions to avoid reputational damage. These whistleblowers are coming to me because they are worried that the grid is becoming unmanageable and they do not have faith that their concerns are being taken seriously. I have written to the CEO of NESO asking them to bring in an independent external investigator to interview control room engineers so that we can find out the truth about what happened on the evening of 23rd June.

I have been contacted by more whistleblowers within our grid operator. They allege the electricity grid is not being run securely, which increases the risk of blackouts, with a particularly severe event on 23rd June. This information is also allegedly being hidden from the public. This morning NESO refused to deny that Corporate Affairs staff had interfered in operational decisions to avoid reputational damage. These whistleblowers are coming to me because they are worried that the grid is becoming unmanageable and they do not have faith that their concerns are being taken seriously. I have written to the CEO of NESO asking them to bring in an independent external investigator to interview control room engineers so that we can find out the truth about what happened on the evening of 23rd June.

I have been contacted by more whistleblowers within our grid operator. They allege the electricity grid is not being run securely, which increases the risk of blackouts, with a particularly severe event on 23rd June. This information is also allegedly being hidden from the public. This morning NESO refused to deny that Corporate Affairs staff had interfered in operational decisions to avoid reputational damage. These whistleblowers are coming to me because they are worried that the grid is becoming unmanageable and they do not have faith that their concerns are being taken seriously. I have written to the CEO of NESO asking them to bring in an independent external investigator to interview control room engineers so that we can find out the truth about what happened on the evening of 23rd June.

I have been contacted by more whistleblowers within our grid operator. They allege the electricity grid is not being run securely, which increases the risk of blackouts, with a particularly severe event on 23rd June. This information is also allegedly being hidden from the public. This morning NESO refused to deny that Corporate Affairs staff had interfered in operational decisions to avoid reputational damage. These whistleblowers are coming to me because they are worried that the grid is becoming unmanageable and they do not have faith that their concerns are being taken seriously. I have written to the CEO of NESO asking them to bring in an independent external investigator to interview control room engineers so that we can find out the truth about what happened on the evening of 23rd June.