Households living near electricity pylons will be given up to £250 a year off their electricity bills in a bid to reduce opposition to renewable energy projects.
Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner will unveil plans to cut annual energy bills for residents living within half a kilometre of new or upgraded power infrastructure by almost 40 per cent.
This means that the electricity bills of those not living near a pylon will rise.
Because it’s the total costs of the system that have to be met, obviously.
The Energy Secretary hopes to pave the way for a mass expansion of Britain’s electricity grid through the countryside by lowering annual average bills by £250 for residents near new pylons.
However, energy experts and campaigners described the move as a “bribe” and warned it would inflate costs for millions of other households who will effectively be required to subsidise the discount.
Why not instead give them big copper coils to put in their lofts ?
That is green electricity pat excellence.
Pat Excellence is an old girlfriend and avid reader of this blog.
I read a while back (IEEE?) that there had been good progress on developing new power lines that could carry twice as much power without any infrastructure change beyond the lines themselves (and obviously bigger transformers etc.). That would make most of the problem go away through technological advance as doubling the capacity of the existing network would likely meet most medium term requirements… unless of course that falls into the category of “upgrade”.
It would be such a surprise if technological advance made an issue disappear as this has never happened before.
So a tiny handful of people might (but almost certainly won’t because it’s not actually going to happen is it?) get the equivalent of their winter fuel payment back?
Rhoda predicts that nobody’s bill is going to go down. Maybe not up so much at a cost to the rest of us. Just like that other scheme the govt pushes to reduce bill for poor folks which is also funded by billing everyone else a bit more. Taxation by the back door, the bastards.
@Mike Finn,
I thought the biggest part of the problem was getting power from remote wind farms in to the grid in the first place?
Up to £250 or almost 40%. Make your mind up, which is it? £5 is “up to” £250.
@Mike Finn:
such upgrades might help on the “backbones” connecting the big cities but it’s not going to help to reach all of the windmills and solar farms built in the middle of nowhere
This is a change. Power lines don’t often run through rich communities. Moribund’s scheme has an egalitarian element, unlike other scams where the rich get paid to put solar on the roof and sell electricity back to the grid.
@Mike Finn. A quick google trip learns that this is mostly a US problem, since they still use “old technology” HV cables.
Cable refactoring is a Thing in Europe, but …as usual with these claims… It *doesn’t* double the capacity, and even with the higher efficiency, it *doesn’t* suddenly upgrade the Grid to a point where we all can switch to EV’s and Heat Exchangers and all the other Green malarkey running off electricity.
If it worked as Advertised, we wouldn’t have the problems with a choked grid here in Clogland, since at least *some* stretches that have been fully refactored should be able to cope, right? Yet it doesn’t.
And it still doesn’t solve the Intermittency problem, nor the local overcapacity problem, nor getting the system to be at least *partly* flexible/reversible to get electrons from where they’re produced to where they’re used.
This particular bear has two paws with 10 claws… Anyone shouting “This One Thing is the Solution” is either nuts, or a Salesman with a grubby paw in the trough.
@BiND: That’s certainly another problem with all sorts of loss and security considerations, but pretty sure that’s a known cost of a HVDC connection. The bigger AC problem right now seems to be moving power from one part on the grid to another, such as Scotland to South England, as greater transmission capacity allows us to put power generation of any type where it is most cost effective.
(No comment on wind/solar/nuclear/gas/whatever here, though the increase in region-specific, volatile generation is obviously the main driver in why this is a big issue today).
@Emil: That’s a very fair point. I guess there are fewer houses in the middle of nowhere though. Still a problem if you like views of hills without pylons of course.
Still a problem if you like views of hills without pylons of course.
You own the hills? No? But you want the view for free?
Cool. Given that I live pretty close to the frackable gas field that was discovered recently, does that mean I can get access to that to reduce my gas bill?
Or is this only for people that live half a mile out in the North Sea?
You own the hills? No? But you want the view for free?
Exactly. We have a lovely view from our conservatory and back garden across fields and hills, my wife calls it a borrowed view.
That said, I would object to something that was high enough to steal light.
“energy experts and campaigners ”
Sure.