Miliband Could Axe Pylons to Fight Reform Threat
Ed Miliband is weighing a major overhaul of the electricity market to cut the number of pylons across rural Britain by introducing regional pricing. The Telegraph has more.
The Energy Secretary has ordered electricity grid planners to examine whether fewer overhead wires would be required throughout the countryside if the power market were broken up, the Telegraph understands.
Sir Keir Starmer previously argued that building new pylons in rural areas was a necessary step to bring down the cost of electricity as part of the drive to reach net zero emissions by 2050. …
The decision to commission a Government study comes as Labour faces pressure in rural areas from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which has accused the Government of spoiling swathes of countryside with a “spider’s web” of pylons and cables.
In Lincolnshire, where Reform has seized control of the local mayoralty and the county council in May’s local elections, Mr Farage and his deputy, Richard Tice, have vowed to wage legal warfare against planned green energy projects. …
The National Energy System Operator (Neso) has estimated that £60 billion worth of upgrades are needed across the electricity network under Labour’s plan for a clean power system, including 4,000 miles of new undersea cables and another 1,000 miles of overland power lines.
This is expected to add up to £30 a year to consumer bills.
Neso has now been told to examine whether the scope of this work can be dramatically cut by switching to a regional, or so-called zonal, electricity pricing system.
This would see households pay different prices for electricity based on supply and demand in their area, in an effort to encourage investment in green power near to where it is needed most.
Zonal pricing supporters say this would cut down the distance between power stations and homes and businesses, lessening the need for cables spanning the country, while also lowering the cost of Net Zero as fewer cables would be needed.
Mr Miliband is understood to have already been shown an analysis by private sector consultants that claimed zonal pricing would result in savings of “tens of billions of pounds” and almost 2,000 fewer miles of wires.
Worth reading in full.
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Complete lunatic trying to build an unworkable system considers a slightly differetnt but also unworkable system.
Does anyone think Ed Minibrain is a Wallace and Gromit character? I have to confess that whenever I see him – especially the way his mouth moves when he is talking I suffer “reality bend” and think I am living in a cartoon listening to and watching a ‘Claymation’ Wallace and Gromit character. Not only am I seeking professional help for my ‘mental elf’ [Ed is the mental elf – not me], can I sue for infringement of my human rights?. See pictures and videos attached which I hope make my point captured on my smartphone. I was going to try to get a selfie but my fingers turned into what seemed like putty in my hands. This all started a long time ago when I had nightmares about 5p coins and I believed the world was shrinking. Fortunately I “woke” up but into a world of Claymation and nothing has gone right since. Now the world is so crazy I keep seeing other Clamation characters like David Lammy and Kier Starmer. I’ll send some pics of them too. Please help me. I am starting a crowdfunder with help from some of the billionaires who fund that really funny TV… Read more »
As promised here are more images of my Claymation cartoon world.
It is really terrible for me. The walking talking clamation electricity pylons and windfarm windmills are really scary too.
Can anyone please help me?
If you cannot understand the subtitles its because in Clamatia [yes it is a real country – part of the United Claynations] we have our own language which is normally automatically translated into English if you are part of the twilight world of the human versions. But for stuff like selfies and videos made in Claymatia they are fixed format. I can send you an English-Claymatia dictionary if it helps.
Zonal pricing supporters say this would cut down the distance between power stations and homes and businesses, lessening the need for cables spanning the country, while also lowering the cost of Net Zero as fewer cables would be needed.
Wasn’t that the case years ago with all those power stations in the Trent Valley (basically the centre of the country that could dispatch power in all directions as needed? With the generation in the North Sea, how will power reach the south without cables? Underground cables – which are more expensive I understand?
Apparently the additional cost of underground cables is less than claimed in the past. It would also be more secure from terrorist or state aggression.
I have never read that high tension lines provide low level defence but maybe they do.
I suspect there are major issues arising for UK defence and security bases and our US guests too with unreliable electricity
Ha. Who cares about the South? Bastards.
Sir Keir Starmer previously argued that building new pylons in rural areas was a necessary step to bring down the cost of electricity as part of the drive to reach net zero emissions by 2050
Just another lie among the many that come from him every time he opens his mouth.
This is expected to add up to £30 a year to consumer bills.
Anyone really believe it will be as low as this?
Is it just me or does anything one else think that with all these rushed changes of heart coming from Two Tier as Reform increases in popularity why would you not just go for Reform in the first place? As we can see from Germany when Merz made all sorts of promises and then as soon as the last votes were counted reneged on them all, why trust any of the Uniparty.
I think the good ship Trust in Uniparty has sailed and is over the horizon.
You are right, if LabourConservative Inc are following Reform UK lead, best go direct to Reform, cut out the lying, cheating, duplicitous, disingenuous, corrupt, evil middlemen.
He must be stopped!. He is wrecking vital infrastructure. He has no idea what he is doing. The following is from the 1960s when the global population was 4 billion. “Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away all the world’s politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present. Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor’s intellect. No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only the personally dedicated initiative of five men to invent those world transforming and world shrinking developments. Herein lies the unexpectedly swift effectiveness of the design-science revolution. Despite this… Read more »
Yes!
All resources – capital, labour, materials, transportation, energy, etc – are scarce. The natural condition of the Human Race is poverty.
Free market capitalism mechanism – supply/demand/price + Human capital and endeavour + plentiful, easily exploited, cheap energy turn scarcity into abundance and is the best way to eradicate poverty.
Historical demonstrable fact: the Industrial Revolution, made possible by abundant cheap primary energy sources – coal, oil, gas.
The intent is to wreck the UK. The following are a small selection of quotes from the predecessors to the Davos set. “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?’ Maurice Strong “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man” Club of Rome “…the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million people but less than one billion” Club of Rome “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.’ Maurice Strong “Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance.’ Lester Brown “The objective, clearly enunciated by the leaders of UNCED, is to bring about a change in the present system of independent nations. The future is to be World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises – whether real or not – is expected to lead to – compliance’ Dixy Lee Ray “The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle… Read more »
Communist entities and individuals, all. Communism never died and was never punished. There should have been very public trials of all communists in all countries.
Ah.
The B Ark.
The UK grid was built at great expense to ensure stability and continuity of supply. To wreck that would be vandalism and cause social and security risks.
Perhaps that is what this Marxists don is trying to do.
Regional pricing would be wrong. Given the huge area of farmland being converted to solar farms in East Anglia, prices there would rocket as there are few stable reliable generators there.
It’s not obvious how splitting the regions re pricing would affect the balance between geographical locations of available source and that of demand. However, it might be economic to demolish a few buildings in Westminster in lieu of a modern power station. That would shorten the amount of cable required, and there’s a useful river to carry things in and out. Year ago, there used to be one at Lot’s Rd, owned by London Underground, after all!
Heck, why demolish the Houses of Parliament? Tell them all to go home and put a nuclear power station in it. It would be infinitely more useful than the current contents.
The UK grid was started in 1926 and completed in 1928, ahead of schedule and below budget. It has of course been expanded incrementally since.
The “plan” is in effect to build a parallel grid to carry a parallel electricity supply, since the current grid cannot cope with intermittency, but will be required complete with spinning generation from gas as back up.
How it is imagined this will save money is not obvious. Nor is it obvious how regional pricing will achieve anything, because it is impossible to match supply with demand using wind and solar by transmitting power from X when it is in surplus to Y where demand may or may not be high, and without causing frequency anomalies (see Spain recently).
Electric grids only work if supply can match demand by forward planning or in real time. This requires continuous output from dispatchable generators. It’s not a mystery.
It is to these numbskulls it seems…
Exactly – take apart something built on engineering and physics principles, and instead replacing it with something built on a commercial principle… let’s see how long that lasts in an emergency.
Madness
It’s either a grid or it isn’t. This idiot is effing dangerous.
He is probably the most immediate clear and present danger we face.
Followed by mass immigration.
Putin a distant 4th or 5th after China
I liken Miliband to Trofim Lysenko.
Genius idea. Without the transmission cables, for zonal pricing read zonal rationing and zonal blackouts.
Just Axe Miliband.
Labour & Conservatives fighting Reform threat = bailing out the Titanic with a tea cup. Tooooo late!
As our American cousins say: arrived a day late and a dollar short.
Labour & Conservatives are the reason why Reform UK exists and is in the lead. People won’t forget what they have done, or believe anything they say.
“… in an effort to encourage investment in green power near to where it is needed most.”
The whole problem with “green power” is it has to be built where meteorological conditions are favourable, and where land is available, rather than where it is needed. Coal and gas can be built and were build near to point of use as these power station have considerably smaller footprint and do not depend on the weather.
And how exactly will off-shore wind be built near to where needed most?
The lunatic is trying to solve the insoluble, the intractable problem of intermittency created by his own stupidity and that of successive Governments over the last 25 years.
No enterprise is viable that cannot plan to match supply and demand, or vary supply to match demand in real time.
Perhaps his next idea might be to move Milton Keynes to the middle of the North Sea? (Actually, he might be onto something with that idea…)
In Shropshire, we are fighting a pylon line being built by a Welsh energy provider, being sold to the Welsh as benefitting them by taking power from a wind farm in central Wales. Unfortunately, Welsh law states power lines have to go underground, which according to the line owner would be too expensive, despite there being any number of national grid feed in stations across Wales. The solution is to build a pylon network across Shropshire to a link into the national grid in Shropshire, that also doesn’t currently exist. How this energy then ends up back to Welsh electricity users is anyone’s guess.
The solution is to scrap the whole bloody nation destroying program.
Exactly – based on those restrictions it’s not commercial viable… in any normal, sane world that would be the end of it… not here in clown world
Unfortunately, Shropshire’s residents were stupid enough to elect a LibDem Council earlier this month.
And if he wants to keep the zonal’s busy, he could suggest that prices could be related to reliability. E.g. pay more if you want a reliable supply, or get a discount with the odd power cut when we can’t deliver it. It used to be called “Interruptible supply”, when offered in the old days by the CEGB and it’s predecessors. Nothing new under the sun. Similar ideas exist in the gas trade.
However, what is new is the existence of “smart” meters with half hourly remote reading. Spot the opportunity in the trade for variable pricing along those lines. An electric auction perhaps?
Pylons are on eyesore and of course they are linked to cancer. About forty years ago there was talk about putting the network underground but it would’ve costed about £20k per taxpayer. At the time that sounded like a lot and it was postponed. After the financial crash the debt of every taxpayer has just got bigger and bigger way beyond 20k. I think it should be reconsidered for aesthetic reasons.
That picture: Noooooooo!. Edzilla!
It’s going to be a tad inconvenient for the Eco Nutters to have all those occasionally semi-useful windmills in the north sea and the entire eastern seaboard of England under the control of Reform Party Councils and MPs who are determined to prevent the destruction of their environment with Red Ed’s lunatic plans.
No wonder they cancelled the local elections in Norfolk and Suffolk.
Best thing to do would be to stop this madness in the first instance. STOP NUT ZERO!!!
I suppose this is good news because people will see that it is merely a sticking plaster to a gaping wound and it will convince them that this lot are crazed idiots.