For this week’s edition of ‘Nimby Watch’, we’re off to the South West coast, where the locals want to stop a boatload of foreign electricity from coming ashore…
Where oh where oh where? North Devon.
Lovely place for a holiday. So’s Morocco.
Sorry, what? All will become clear. It’s not houses this week, it’s a massive renewable power facility: a 77 square mile solar farm, plus a 580 square mile wind farm. Throw in some batteries, and the Xlinks project should be able to supply enough electricity for 7 million homes, as much as 8% of the UK’s electricity consumption at a stroke – and at any time of day, too.
But that’s enormous! It’s not even that sunny in Devon! No, but it is in Morocco. Devon – to be specific, near Abbotsham – is where the cable connecting us to it would come ashore.
And it’s North Devon? Isn’t Morocco, y’know, south of Devon? The world’s longest undersea cable – 2,500 miles of it – will be bypassing a lot of places in its quest to bring renewable energy to the good people of Britain. It will pass Portugal, Spain and France without stopping, because, hilariously, doing so would over-complicate the planning process. It’ll also go a slightly long way round to hug the coast, and thus avoid the abyssal depths of the Bay of Biscay. After all that, going a few dozen extra miles to get round Land’s End, so it can join the National Grid without major infrastructure upgrades, probably seems like no big deal.
And the people of Morocco are fine with having a British power facility the size of Hertfordshire dropped on them are they? Hard to be sure, as their views on the matter have not, that I can see, garnered a BBC write-up. Those of the people of North Devon by contrast…
‘Why can’t they send it to Cornwall’? If anything, you flatter them. The issue is that nine miles of cable need to be buried – not strung from the pylons people are always complaining about, you note, but buried, where they can’t ruin anyone’s view – but that’ll take a few years, and it turns out that people don’t like that either. One retired couple is complaining ‘lights, lorries and drilling’ would ruin their ‘perfect paradise’.
To be fair, five years is a fair chunk of a retirement, you can see why they’d be upset. Sure, but there will always be people to whom five years of construction work is going to be a bit disruptive: that doesn’t mean they should get a veto on a project which would supply a measurable proportion of the nation’s energy needs.
There’s also a farmer, who says he’ll lose 20% of his productive agricultural land during construction.
That 20% is a lot. For the few years it takes to bury the cable. Yes, it’ll be disruptive. Yes, it’ll mean a lot of lorries. Yes, god knows, the people affected should be properly compensated, and perhaps under current plans they aren’t being! It wouldn’t be the first time.
But this is a corridor a mere 65m wide, that’ll be bothering anyone for just a few years, and which will, when completed, provide nearly one-twelfth of the entire country’s energy needs from renewable sources. It’s possible that building the National Grid or West Coast Main Line or London made a bit of noise and meant a few more lorries, too. It is still, on balance, good that we built those things.
Okay, but if the government was spending billions of public money on ruining your life- It isn’t! It’s privately funded!
Oh right, so for all these grand figures we only have some capitalists’ word then do we? Yes! And maybe they’re talking things up a bit, it wouldn’t be the first time for that, either! But the state can’t afford to do everything, this is a multi-billion pound private investment of the exact sort we keep being told we need to rebuild the economy, and if we didn’t let capitalists build things that might not deliver quite the benefits or profits that they told people they would we probably wouldn’t have the National Grid or West Coast Main Line or London, either.
Anyway, the project does not currently have planning permission. It’s a ‘project of national importance’, so ultimately the decision will be made by the Secretary of State – but apparently it could take several years before they even start, which is just great.
Would it be easier if it came ashore elsewhere? Perhaps we should have a review. God no, that’d mean more delays and more infrastructure and would, in any case, just annoy a different bunch of people. Going all the way to North Devon may mean a longer cable, but at least it’s only annoying fish.
I note from the BBC report that the Nimbys are worrying about effects on the local economy, asking ‘What tourists will want to come here when the area is completely disrupted?’ Good for them. I’m worrying about who might want to come to Britain at all when the lights start going out.
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