Ed Miliband responds to letter from No Pylons Lincolnshire

Ed Miliband has said the country cannot afford to delay upgrading its electricity network any longer, in response to a campaigner opposed to National Grid’s plans for a string of new pylons.

The pylon line would stretch 140km between Grimsby West and through Lincolnshire to Walpole in Norfolk. A non-legally required public consultation was held last year on a proposed route corridor — which would pass through South Holland.

No Pylons Lincolnshire is opposed to the scheme and founder member Cat Makinson wrote to the Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary about it in December, forwarded on by Louth and Horncastle MP Victoria Atkins.

Mr Miliband has now replied, writes Local Democracy Reporter Ivan Morris Poxton.

He apologised for the delay, and defended the planned new pylon lines on security and decarbonisation grounds. “Rolling out renewable power and building the electricity grid we need is the backbone of energy security for our country,” he says in the letter.

“We need to transform our electricity networks to connect clean, home-grown electricity generation to homes and businesses across the country.

“This is essential to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel markets, controlled by petrostates and dictators.” He goes onto say: “The current network was mostly built in the middle of the last century, and we cannot afford to delay upgrading it any longer.”

His remarks echo the Prime Minister, who emphasised at Labour’s autumn conference the need for overground pylons for cheaper electricity.

Mr Miliband also defended solar farms, stating the Government continues to believe it “does not pose a threat to food security”. Where possible, industrial and brownfield land is preferred, and then lower quality agricultural land.

“As the calculations of Ms Makinson attest, even in the most ambitious scenarios, solar farms would occupy less than one per cent of the UK’s agricultural land in 2035.”

However, No Pylons Lincolnshire’s Peter Philips said: “The percentage will be much higher for counties disproportionately impacted, such as Lincolnshire.”

In his letter, Mr Miliband states the Government’s clean power target means transitioning to an electricity system where clean sources produce at least 95 per cent of Great Britain’s generation in a year. Ms Makinson disputes its feasibility.

“There is no way we can produce 95 percent of our own energy from wind and solar. His statement allows for just over 18 days a year when the skies are grey and the wind doesn’t blow, or blows too hard, just like it has for the past couple of weeks; and we haven’t factored in solar generating zero at night.”

The Energy Security Secretary also states it is expected a clean power system would turn Great Britain into a net electricity exporter. Ms Makinson said: “As for selling overgeneration – when weather conditions here produce more than we can use, who is going to want to buy our spare when the rest of Europe will also be generating their own from wind and solar?

“None of it stacks up. There are too many eggs in the solar basket.”

No Pylons Lincolnshire describes itself as supportive of clean energy, but only small-scale, locally-serving solar projects, not those that cause “needless destruction of our landscape and the loss of the UK’s prime agricultural land”.

A second National Grid consultation on the Grimsby West to Walpole overhead line proposals is expected this year.