Keir Starmer Overrules Ed Miliband to Snub Net Zero Project
Sir Keir Starmer has overruled Ed Miliband by snubbing plans for a green energy plant in favour of a massive data centre in a major blow to the Energy Secretary’s Net Zero plans. The Telegraph has more.
The Prime Minister has effectively closed the door on the construction of a major hydrogen project on Teesside – believed to be backed by Mr Miliband – by deciding to endorse a rival tech development near the site, according to correspondence seen by the Telegraph.
The H2Teesside plan, proposed by BP, would have produced so-called ‘blue’ hydrogen that could have provided up to 10% of the supply Mr Miliband has said Britain would need by 2030.
However, the plan clashes with proposals on nearby land for Europe’s largest data centre – backed by Teesworks, the public-private partnership supported by Tees Valley Mayor Lord Houchen.
A letter to Lord Houchen from Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, confirms that the Government is planning to designate the Teesworks site as an “AI growth zone”, a central plank of the Prime Minister’s plan to make Britain an artificial intelligence hub.
It describes the Teesworks data centre as “the cornerstone of the UK’s AI strategy” and states that Sir Keir’s AI adviser will join a group dedicated to the project.
The decision to designate the site an AI growth zone was made by the AI task force, chaired by Number 10.
“The Government will put its full weight behind Teesworks and Teesside International Airport becoming an AI growth zone,” the letter says, adding that Ministers will push major AI companies to invest in the project.
The letter is due to be published by the Planning Inspectorate on Friday as part of a review of the hydrogen project. Last month Mr Miliband delayed a decision on it until the end of October “to allow time to request further information”.
The data centre and hydrogen plant projects are on overlapping plots of land and planning documents have stated that they are incompatible.
Worth reading in full.
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So called “Blue Hydrogen” is a con, isn’t it? What is the thermal efficiency of it compared with burning methane to generate electricity? https://theconversation.com/blue-hydrogen-what-is-it-and-should-it-replace-natural-gas-166053
The proposed data centre will need a lot of power from a reliable source, no doubt.
A colour attached to the name is a pretty reliable telltale sign of BS.
Blue is “green” but not quite as green. Actually not green at all, but it’s a heroic attempt to fool people into thinking that power generated by gas is something somehow greener than gas powered generation.
“Green” of course is the ultimate BS. It’s meant to mean non CO2 producing. What it really means is that the CO2 produced is far enough back in the value chain that you can ignore it if you like. But of course, our entire civilisation would collapse if we stopped burning fossil fuels, starting with all the “green” stuff.
If you see a colour, someone is trying to pull one over you. That’s my rule.
Obviously bollixks.
The ‘blue’ hydrogen is acknowledged to be non-Green but the intention is to produce enough hydrogen so that people can build stuff capable of burning it and later produce real ‘Green’ hydrogen with spare wind or solar power.
Jack the dog’s answer is more realistic and succinct – as long as he does not mean it’s the dog’s bollixks.
Well its a small step in the right direction. Massive AI DC’s are also not the right direction, if this land is currently arable land.
Anything Miliband supports, is something no right thinking person should support, the man is an utter cretin!
Using natural gas to make hydrogen is just insane, you get way less energy out than you put in, entropy is already reducing our energy ROI (burning natural gas to produce electricity is well below 100% efficient), this just compounds the entropy!
At it’s best, a plant like Didcot B can achieve up to 64%, with Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGT), and that’s about the maximum. No doubt it can be worse at lower output levels.
Why is the state involved in any of this? So much for a free market economy.
The Free market economy only exists as an economic theory!
A free market can work where ‘government’ or a monopoly doesn’t interfere so, currently, it doesn’t work in the West.
In fact, soon, any mention of a free market economy will become hate speech as it will offend public sector workers.
Here’s a hint: The state subsidizes so-called AI for the exact same reason it also subsidizes wind farms or rather, people developing so-called AI need taxpayer money for the exact same reason wind farm developers also need it.
Hard to see in the short term at least how “AI” can be monetised or provide a return on investment
I read an article the other day about how much people were “using AI” and it smacked of a desperate attempt to make it seem widespread and generally useful
In my experience it is OK at very simple standalone coding tasks. Would be interested to see what kind of job it would make of something more complex including considerations such as number of bugs, performance, maintainability, understandability, extensibility – and what it produced in the hands of a mediocre team as opposed to a really good one, and the relative effort involved in using AI and checking it vs doing it yourself
The way to “monetise” AI is to get politicians like Keir Starmer to spend a lot of other people’s money on salaries for “AI people” and really expensive toys for them. And it’s working, see above. This is, by the way, the only way AI has ever worked and was ever meant to work since this scam got started at MIT in the mid-1960s.
Claude wrote me a stupidly simple VBA Excel macro the other day- saved me an hour or two. I could have learnt more and done it myself but I may never need to do another one again
We’re going to see if it can make any sense of our huge code base to assist developers- just a cheap side project. I’ve no idea whether it will get anywhere.
As Nietzsche once put it: Die Welt will betrogen sein.
[free translation: People yearn to be scammed.]
That’s how Turn something into gold kept going for such a long time and how the lottery still works today. People, at least very many of them , simply don’t want to accept that something they’d absolutely love to have – in the case of AI, an intelligent being which one could legally keep and exploit as a slave – isn’t possible. They very much prefer the promises of snakeoil salesmen.
Coming to think of that, I absolutely love this story: Microsoft Office Productivity tools — it only takes 60 years and trillions of dollars spent on AI research and huge investements to build massive data centres on top of that to figure out how to actually use them for something!
Great ease-of-use story. Send it to them, they might want to use it in their marketing in future.
🙂 🙂
AI is a total con.
We have spent very little on it and found it a useful tool in the same way that other tools are useful in the software development process. For us, hardly revolutionary but hardly a “total con” – just overhyped, like most things
In my experience it is OK at very simple standalone coding tasks.
In plain English, this means: It’s good at helping CS studens cheat in their exams because these involve only kindergarten problems with solutions which have been well-known for at least a few decades because – as opposed to the CS students – it has these solutions programmed into it.
As an “STEM student” told me just a couple of days ago: AI can do all of my homework for me! And that’s a typical “STEM student” because “How do we cheat our way through the exams?” was already the burning question when I was at university about 30 years ago.
Perhaps Miliband is secretly planning to bring back giant airships? Said airships could double up as convenient hydrogen storage, after all, the R101 was a ripping success, wasn’t it Ed? Nothing dangerous or stupid about hydrogen….. tum de tum….
I have a much better idea for a much cheaper technical innovation we could put to much better use: Let’s construct a battery of large wheels constructed like the mill water wheels of old. These should be mounted on some scaffold high enough over the ground that they can rotate freely with about 1′ 7″ between lower rim of the wheel and the ground. Build a system of windmills providing the rotational energy making the first set of wheels turn. Hang a boot filled with wood or hard rubber from each paddle of the water wheels. Now, we’d have a green “kick someone’s a** repeatedly” machine which could be very gainfully employed in politics, higher education or similar areas of life. And it could even kick several a**es very efficiently by utilizing parallellization.
What a load of ai shit. How about reducing energy costs for consumers and industry and shopping trying to micromanage the economy.
F##cking imbeciles. Globalist technocrat w@nkers.
“Taking the Chiltern Hundreds” refers to one of the legal fictions used to effect resignation from the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.
Perhaps in the future the “Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero” job will become a legal fiction to acknowledge political disfavour and ministerial resignation in the near future?
I suspect this story is classic government spin. I suspect that even the numpties have realised hydrogen is a non-starter so they wanted to kill off this project.
Starmer is on the back foot while Miliband is hated. What better than to pretend the oh-so-tough PM had over ruled the Energy Secretary.
Two opposites. Maximising consumption vs wasting most energy producing the electricity to supply the deficit.
It proves that neither Mad Ed or Kneel understand anything.
Well they understand how to get elected and both of them are most likely richer and certainly more powerful than you and I
Hydrogen projects are collapsing in most countries while the retarded Uk government still think there is a future in it. And as for an AI data centre, where is the power going to come from unless they build their own? And what about the cost of the power?
The government have realised that they will need massive data centres to store all our personal information, social media messages and movement logs.
And to analyze them for suspicious “patterns.” I’m willing to risk a bet that someone is trying to sell “early crime prevention AI” to government officials based on mining of such data.
Milliband undermined what’s left of Keir’s authority by refusing to move to housing, now Keir seeks revenge by treading on his toes – this isn’t what firm government looks like.