Representation by Nicholas Grice
- Date submitted
- 2 March 2023
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
As an ex domestic solar installer who is broadly supportive of renewables to reduce CO2 emissions and offset the UK’s baseload reliance on expensive gas - I strongly oppose the Mallard Pass proposal. In a time of geo political uncertainty and disrupted supply chains the UK needs to play to its strategic strengths of being a maritime, windy (and not particularly sunny) island in the north Atlantic - especially when it comes to critical industries involving food and energy. Investment incentives and the UK’s location in the North Atlantic have recently contributed to it steadily becoming a relative world leader in generating power from off shore wind – capacity is now approaching 30 GW and this is a good strategic use of the natural wind resources available. When conditions are favourable between 10 and 40% of UK energy can now be generated from wind. This will grow toward 60% in the next 12 years as capacity increases As an example of the huge output wind can produce vs solar, the recently commissioned 1.3 Gigawatt Hornsea 2 wind farm in the North Sea comprises 165 wind turbines of 8 MW each and the installation is claimed to collectively power 1.3 million homes (at 1000KW per home) or 8000 homes per wind turbine. Consider [Redacted] original headline pitch claiming Mallard Pass’s proposed 350 MW would be able to power upto 92000 homes - that output is the equivalent to just 11 of the new Hornsea 2 offshore wind turbines – which obviously work at night too. So if we apply this approach of energy generated to opportunity cost of good land , are we seriously proposing (for the next 25 to 30 years) to requisition and industrialize an area of good fertile agricultural land (two thirds the size of Rutland Water itself) to become a power plant of negligible overall contribution that adds only the equivalent electricity to the UK grid of just eleven wind turbines out to sea? - It’s lunacy of HS2 proportions. This is before considering all the negative externalities associated with living “in“ the project itself for 25 years, like prison style perimeter fencing, loss of footpaths and wildlife habitat, disrupted deer near roads , the increased fire hazard of battery banks in fields (why can’t these go in the footprint of old coal plants?) acre upon hundred acre of dark blue panels filling the fields from horizon to horizon, the noise and disruption of relentless site traffic over the months of construction and their eventual disposal – presumably to land fill – how “green” is that? [Redacted] will no doubt argue how relatively cheap Mallard Pass will be to install and generate electricity per MWH especially relative to other energy generation projects like nuclear - however given that the UK energy market pegs the wholesale MWH price of electricity to the price of gas none of this cost benefit will be passed on to consumers in the form of cheaper bills anyway. The irrelevance of Mallard Pass is underlined even further when other (soon to be completed) large UK offshore wind projects are considered – these include Moray East - (950 MW) Triton Knoll (857 MW) Neart Na Gaoithe (450 MW) Sophia (1400 MW) Seagreen (1075 MW) and Dogger bank A, B&C (3600MW) – Collectively these offshore wind projects sum to 8.3 GW (equivalent to powering 8.3 million homes – or the output of 90 Mallard Passes) so the metaphorical green cavalry is already coming. When you consider that this proposal is now also set to the back drop of the Ukraine invasion with the associated effects on food security and increased commodity prices from that conflict affecting everyone – surely good agricultural land needs to be treated as the valuable strategic resource that it is, before allowing it to be leased out to the highest corporate bidder for such a negligible contribution to UK green energy targets.