The Mounting Impact of Net Zero in One Rural Area

This sketch map shows a part of Lincolnshire just outside Grantham, an indifferent but well-connected market town and the one where Margaret Roberts, later Thatcher, was born and grew up.

The map popped through my letterbox the other day. It was drawn up by a local group. 

The blue patches are not reservoirs. They are the solar farms that have been approved or are pending. The yellow lines show where roads and tracks will be torn up to install the heavy cabling from the solar farms. We have been told to expect heavy lorry traffic when the farms and cabling are put in.

This is a vignette of the world being inflicted on us in the name of Net Zero. The scale of the map is about 3.5 miles (5.5 km) from left to right, covering prime Lincolnshire farmland on which food has been grown for centuries. But as we well know, the Government’s inheritance tax raid on farms has already resulted in the highest ever rate of farms – at over 6,000 in the last year – going out of business. Tenant farmers are also being thrown off their farms to make way for solar installations.

It’s also self-evident from the map that there’s room for yet more solar farms. Luckily, they can’t spread west because of a steep slope, a large National Trust estate and a light industrial estate on the east side of Grantham. But the large area in the middle of the map looks ripe for the plucking too.

The usable life of these solar farms, which will industrialise a rural landscape and irrevocably change it, is supposedly fifty years (according to the planning application for one of them). 

By the time five decades have passed, all the politicians responsible will be retired or dead. The people in the companies installing these solar farms and supposedly responsible for reinstating the land, will all have vanished or died too, the farms themselves probably having been sold on soon after construction and commissioning. Most of the people who live round here, and that includes certain landowners agreeing to these projects, will have moved on or become deceased. 

However, it’s a moot point whether the solar farms will last that long, or even half that time (assuming they even get as far as going into operation). One solar farm in West Australia, partly funded by taxpayers, had only a 25-year life expectancy but is being dismantled seven years early, raising questions about whether it was ever going to be able to provide a return on the investment and what to do with the components. I’ve seen for myself in Australia the distasteful sight of abandoned wind farms, and what to do with others is becoming a controversial issue. 

Worse, it seems that while some solar and wind farms are closed down before the end of their expected lives, some get built but never start up. PV Magazine reported back in February on nine projects in Italy, Spain, Venezuela and Argentine, six of which went wrong – three alone being abandoned before completion. In America, two million solar panels in a huge solar farm are on track to be abandoned in the Mojave Desert. 

No doubt the UK Government would claim that regulations here are tighter. But legal costs have forced two councils to pull out of making a legal challenge to a solar farm in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, while in Norfolk one community faces the demolition of homes to make way for a solar farm. How long then before this little patch of Lincolnshire sees the same thing happening to join up the planned solar farms shown in the map?

This is therefore the world we are in the process of imposing on the future, and our descendants. It will thus be our legacy and what they either blame or thank us for. It has a parallel in the effects of the first Industrial Revolution on the British landscape. 

It’s true of course that all human development comes at a price. Everything we do has an impact but it’s a compromise we have for the most part had to learn to live with. But there are compromises and there are compromises.

I have no problem with using solar and wind power. Of course not. It would be insane not to take advantage of either. But at what price? It is astonishing that the Government’s energy policy, which is supposed to be in the name of cleaning up this planet, is resulting in a different type of destruction and scarring. 

Not only is productive farmland being reduced merely to being plots for solar panels, but it appears we are also busily at the same moment shutting down as much industry as possible, along with thousands of jobs. Car and van production is set to be the lowest since 1952. Steel manufacture and oil refining are being abandoned in a bid to relocate such industries elsewhere in the world so that we can bask in a self-righteous fancy that, by turning Britain into a beacon of eco-enlightenment, we will singlehandedly save the planet.

I suppose there is some consolation in the fact that fields covered with solar panels can’t be covered with vast new shoddy housing estates, though there are plenty of those being thrown up not far away too. And plans to install a huge battery farm close to the new solar farms in the map have been abandoned by the company concerned because of the complete lack of suitable infrastructure to connect the batteries to the National Grid. But there’s every possibility it will be revived.

The most worrying aspect of all this is the frantic pace. Government projects flung together in an unseemly haste have a history of being both flawed and catastrophic wastes of public money. The technology is new and not yet fully developed, making the frenzied dash even more insane. And with so much electrical equipment involved, breakdowns and software issues are becoming more widespread and sometimes even dangerous.

The policy is in part predicated on making Britain strategically independent of having to import energy. But with solar and wind power’s inability to compensate for cloudy and windless days, that’s another fantasy. Moreover, we are now becoming strategically more vulnerable by ramping up our dependence on imported steel and other industrial products, as well as food in ever more dizzying quantities. You can’t eat electricity.

The Roman historian Tacitus put these words into the mouth of a fictitious chieftain called Calgacus to condemn the Romans: ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant, “where they make desolation, they call it peace.” We can change that to ubi solitudinem faciunt, viridem appellant, “where they make desolation, they call it green.” 

It’s true that most people at all times and in most places are inclined “to complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future” (Edmund Burke, 1770).

Perhaps I’m missing something, but apart from those short-term coining it in on the Net Zero gravy train, and given all the other enormous problems Britain is facing, just exactly where does the present (and the previous) government expect this country, or even just my little patch of Lincolnshire, to be in half a century?

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His most recent book is The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome. A History of the Ptolemies (2024). His next book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (August 2025).

Stop Press: It now appears the International Court of Justice has ruled that nations like Britain could be sued for reparations by other countries for contributing to climate change, another episode in proving that all you ever need to do is follow the money.