Yesterday Rachel Reeves announced that crazy David Cameron's effective ban for English onshore wind has been cancelled. UK has lost ten years of local activity to reduce bills and help poor communities, as Mark Pepper did near Bristol docks in 2023, one of the very few projects that got through since 2015 (Ambition Lawrence Weston: a Q&A with Mark Pepper – The Society of Merchant Venturers). But it took him 5 years to get it done in 2023. He is a Boys Club leader and deserves immense praise for his resilience. He got it right by installing the biggest onshore wind turbine in England at 4.3MW. It is far better to have one large device rather than a messy farm of small turbines. No noise and no dead birds. Just the usual NIMBY complaints from the nearby factory that suggested the turbine could jump up and travel a large distance to land on their building. A typical UK village could run on a 5MW turbine surrounded by 5MW of solar panels, with hydrogen storage to fill the gaps. There are about 10,000 UK villages with population around 10,000 so that producing local power for every village will produce 100GW of new green energy with hydrogen to power buildings, vehicles and local industries, while making considerable profits. Distributed power is coming at last after 30 years of empty talk.
See the recent paper attached for more info.