Simply days after an enormous election win, UK’s new Labour authorities has hit the bottom working and is already making progress on rising solar energy deployment.
The UK simply held an election on July 4th, by which the nation declared its independence from the Tories (heh) and handed Labour a historic landslide win.
The brand new Labour authorities has made inexperienced vitality coverage a precedence, desirous to quickly enhance photo voltaic and wind energy.
In service of that objective, Vitality Secretary Ed Miliband authorised three photo voltaic farms this weekend, on the finish of his first full week on the job. The farms are in Suffolk/Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and Rutland – all in east England. The primary two farms will generate 500MW of energy, the latter will generate 350MW.
The farms had been blocked by the earlier Tory administration, which Miliband labored shortly to treatment.
Mixed, these three initiatives account for 1.35GW, or about 2/3 as a lot as the whole photo voltaic capability put in within the UK final 12 months. This quantity of energy is sufficient to provide round 400,000 houses with electrical energy.
Miliband additionally mentioned he desires to start out a “rooftop revolution” by rewriting planning guidelines to allow extra rooftop photo voltaic, each for current houses and for patrons searching for to buy newly constructed houses with panels already put in. (We reported on the same transfer in Michigan final week which made it simpler for householders in an HOA to put in rooftop photo voltaic.)
I need to unleash a UK photo voltaic rooftop revolution. We’ll encourage builders and householders in no matter means we will to ship this win-win know-how to hundreds of thousands of addresses within the UK so folks can present their very own electrical energy, lower their payments and on the similar time assist combat local weather change
Ed Miliband, UK Vitality Secretary
These rules haven’t but been rewritten, however we’ll see extra on them sooner or later.
Along with this weekend’s photo voltaic bulletins, final week, Miliband lifted restrictions that had been placed on onshore wind that had amounted to a “de facto” ban on its set up. The earlier coverage blocked any mission that obtained any public pushback in any respect, whatever the scale of that pushback – permitting NIMBYs to cease any enchancment in Britain’s vitality future.
The brand new initiatives and insurance policies are working in the direction of Labour’s objective to double onshore wind, triple solar energy, and quadruple offshore wind by 2030. Labour additionally plans to introduce a brand new state-owned energy firm, GB Vitality, to speed up the decarbonization of vitality provide, which we must always hear extra about within the coming week.
Renewable vitality is seen as necessary for Britain not solely because of its lack of air pollution, however as a result of it is going to assist to supply vitality safety. A lot of Europe’s methane comes from Russia, which means that working electrical energy era off of fossil fuel helps to fund the invasion of Ukraine. This isn’t solely unpopular throughout the continent and within the UK particularly, however it additionally contributes to volatility of electrical energy costs for Britons. Putting in extra home sources of electrical energy within the type of wind and photo voltaic may also help to cut back that volatility and dependence on overseas vitality sources.
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