The Folly of Solar – a Dot on the Horizon Versus a Blight on the Land
This week, I was out filming in Suffolk for my film on Ed Miliband and Net Zero. I had considered filming the interview that was the main reason for being in the county in front of a nearby solar farm, but it was surrounded by fences and a hedge. However, I planned to get some drone footage of the solar farm and the Sizewell B nuclear power station, which is also the site of the Sizewell C development. I didn’t realise it until I got home and reviewed the video, but accidentally, Sizewell is just about visible from drone footage from the solar farm. And this in turn tells us something about how utterly bonkers renewable energy is.
Yes, you can barely see Sizewell B’s dome in the background. It’s a white dot on the horizon. If you’re reading this page on a phone, I doubt you can see it at all, unless you are able to zoom in. But that’s the point. The nuclear power station lies nine miles away from the solar farm at Former RAF Parham Airfield, near Framlingham. The two sites occupy roughly the same physical footprint but produce completely different outputs.
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Most interesting Ben – thank you. And concerns about solar panels, including the use of forced labour (i.e. slavery) in their manufacture, are exacerbated by the discovery in the US of communication devices (‘kill switches’) in Chinese-built power inverters installed in solar panels and batteries: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-found-chinese-inverters-2025-05-14/
All down to energy density (which goes hand in hand with energy gradient), continuity of supply and despatchability (deficiency of which likely unbalanced Iberia’s grid last month).
Hydrocarbons, nuclear and hydro tick all three boxes, wind (and solar) tick none – an inconvenient truth known to millers and mariners since time immemorial, yet centuries later lost on green neophytes and gullible Klimate Klaptrap Kommissars.
Also captured as Energy Returned on Energy Invested – optimal for hydrocarbons, nuclear and hydro, derisory for wind and solar. Don’t expect the KKK to understand that either…
https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-net-zero
“…You can’t boil an egg in a swimming pool. Or run Britain on breezes.“
Brilliant; thanks.
One thing that you might want to consider is the land required to store the nuclear waste. But then you’d also need to factor in the land required to store the solar panels once they break.
All of the high level nuclear waste ever produced would form a solid cube with each side a little over 21 metres long.
Thanks. In comparison we would need a gigantic hole to bury all the panels.
It is more than that as you have the problems of chemical elements leeching out into the ground water and contaminating it. Perhaps we would need to build something like the Mulberry Harbour caissons, fill them with panels and them sink them in the ocean.
Good point. Perhaps this stuff can be put into the holes they will dig for “sequestering carbon”…
Plastic which is inert and stable MUST NOT BE BURIED – because planetary collapse would be imminent.
The objection to nuclear waste is it (relatively small quantities as you point out) must be buried, costing relatively little – which according to the Eco-fascists is a terrible idea: earthquakes, terrier attacks, water courses… something.
However burying vast amounts of C02… compressed? liquified?… at huge cost… no problem.
Yeah, but if the CO2 leaks it won’t be a proble… Oh. Wait.
Terrier attacks?. I think my Jack Russell would definitely be up for that
Do you think that it would be wise, a 21mete cube of solid high-level waste?
The great thing about radioactive waste is that eventually it becomes no more radioactive than the granite in Cornwall. Close down an old nuclear power station, leave it where it is for 100 years, and there’s no need to worry about “nuclear waste”.
Don’t forget you also need to factor in the amount of land needed for the exploding time bombs, sorry I meant battery farms, that will be needed to store the surplus energy to be used when there is no sun or wind. We have one currently before our LibDem planning authority (so guaranteed acceptance) that the previous Tory administration decided needed no environmental impact assessment, because they didn’t follow the government guidelines of considering worst case scenario (a runaway fire of a battery), but only the impact of passive use.
Good point. Perhaps Mr Pile could do a follow up on “storage” and how basically there are no plausible options. I know California has a law that new power stations need battery storage equivalent to their nameplate capacity but it’s only a few hours worth. There was a fire at one of those recently…think it was featured on DS.
I heard that all global nuclear waste ever produced would fill a football stadium… don’t ask me which one..
One way out of the conundrum would be to cover large tracts of desert around the world so that enough solar panels were always in sunlight. And then you would need high capacity interconnections (already technically possible) to countries to deliver the ‘desert power’.
Of course this would require some degree of world government to ensure that the power could not be switched off for political or warfare reasons. I wonder if world government is the true aim of Net Zero? Surely not.
In order to reduce our reliance on hydrocarbons from a politically unstable region, we tie ourselves to China and regions with deserts like, er, the highly stable Middle East and North Africa….genius!
Or build coal fired power stations near to points of use.
I think it comes a lowly second behind a far nobler cause – subsidy farming, earning 15% returns with full UK government underwriting
Solar Power Huge Stains on Landscapes
A short sharp outage in a major UK city is perhaps needed to prove our grid’s fragility. I wonder how concerned the whole population of Iberia are at the moment.
Given what we have learnt from the Spanish experiment, an outage here is unlikely to be short.
And unlikely to be confined to just one city.
We’d be told it’s our fault – get smart meters, use less electricity.
“ And nuclear can be cheaper and quicker.”
No it cannot! This is a fantasy.
Hinckley Point C (joint venture EDF + Chinese) is going to be over a decade late and double the original budget (now around £40 billion).
It has been guaranteed an inflation-linked lifetime price of £128 per MWh which five times what was originally agreed in 2016 when the project was started, and currently more expensive than the strike prices for wind and solar.
Hinckley was a disaster from the start, but what do we expect from the government in power at the time. If better planned and managed, that is, not French build and Chinese money, when the French design was already struggling with timelines and cost at a similar plant in France, it could have been so much different. I don’t think anyone is thinking of full sized nuclear plants today when they discuss nuclear but SMR from Rolls Royce, which will be cheaper per MW and quicker.
Hinckley Point C was not Government. Government refused to get involved, hence the EDF/China jv. Nobody else wanted to do it because it was too risky, ie too capital intensive, unviable without rigged prices… like wind and solar.
SMR – has cost us £260 million in taxpayer subsidies already and we haven’t seen even 1 Wh. If they are such winners why wouldn’t RR’s investors take the risk and stump up the cash?
“They will be cheaper per MW.” How can you possibly know this when none are operational and require massive subsidy to “research” them? And haven’t we heard “will be cheaper per MW” before somewhere?
And by the way: electricity is bought and sold by the MWh.. the unit of consumption, not per MW which is the unit of energy.
Why would multiple nuclear generators be less expensive to build and operate than one large one?
Nuclear cannot be used as back-up to intermittent wind and solar as they require to be run continuously not intermittently, to avoid damage to the reactor core.
Isn’t electricity cheaper in France than in UK? France is known to have a large nuclear generating capacity.
https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/graph-how-do-french-electricity-prices-compare-with-other-eu-countries-and-uk/715035
Of course there’s price /kWh but then there’s daily standing charge and taxes to take into account.
Whether it’s a blight or not depends on one’s point of view. It depends where they are and what they replace. E.g. the one at the old RAF Wrougthon site does not replace any worked farm land, and does not look out of place from the old Ridgeway footpath – at least, not to me. It’s rated at about 60 MW peak output. However, that is about 3% of the old Didcot A coal fired plant, with a similar land take including the coal stock etc (which was increased a bit after the 1985 strike).
Incidentally, the financing of that site might be worth investigating for those who are interested in such things.
I’ve been a baby investor in domestic solar PV for a decade or so, and the kit on my roof was made in Malaysia & assembled in France – it’s not all made in China.
I too have “invested” in your roof-top scam… involuntary of course, using money taken from me in my taxes and via my electricity bill to be given to you.
An investment is something that yields a return greater than what is invested – when do I get my return? Do I collect it from you perhaps?
They will be smashed to bits when things get worse. No procedure in place for cleaning up the mess just nasty remains of fake dreams. Any worship of the environment should be driven by a sense of beauty. Their agenda does its best to be the very opposite and this isn’t by accident. You can’t sit back and let the demons decide what is good for you
I have long suspect a major raft of the CO2 man-made warming bunk assertion is to shift the environmentalist lobby to support, advocate, nuclear power generation and shift western economies away from dependancy on hydrocarbon supplier nations.
Logic suggests there is more than just prospering from the shift to zero emission motivating this psyop.
It would also be interesting to compare the capital investment and running costs of a nuclear power plant and a solar farm. Just to complete the picture. And to include the replacement of panels, batteries and back up systems etc.
Has anyone got an update on Ed’s Plutonium?
Technology break through to replace fossil fuels, explained.
https://youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag?feature=shared
Mad Ed Minibrain to grant £800 billion for development.
A good read, thank you
And that is without mentioning the extra cost of replacing the whole thing every few years