The hot air announcement

Lloyd Burr writes:

They look good on paper: Nine new solar farms and three new wind farms that would produce a combined peak output of 1566 megawatts – more than three-and-a-half Clyde Dams. 

The solar farms would comprise 1.9 million panels and would create 2300 jobs in their construction. 

The wind farms would see 840 construction jobs to install 82 turbines which would cut 150 million kg of carbon emissions. 

But there’s a problem: they might not actually go ahead. 

They haven’t been consented. They haven’t been approved. Some of them we already knew about.

The Government is announcing a massive ‘if’. Their press releases used phrases like “if approved”, “could generate” and “could create”. 

There’s every chance the expert consenting panels may decline them, in which case the Government has just announced a whole lot of nothing. 

Ironically the biggest opponents of renewable energy projects tend to be local environmental activists and NIMBYs.