With its choice of Hinkley Point C – a £100 billion nuclear boondoggle – its enthusiastic support for expensive and environmentally harmful fracking, and its relentless attack on renewable energy, the UK government’s energy policy is both morally and economically bankrupt, write Peter Strachan & Alex Russell. It must urgently reconsider this folly and embrace the renewable energy transition.
Ecologist 27th Sept 2016 read more »
The Renewable Energy Association has welcomed plans from Labour MPs to create 300,000 new renewable energy jobs. The organisation also highlighted the “extraordinary opportunity” the UK is facing within the renewable and clean tech industries. The comments come after shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change Barry Gardiner pledged to ban fracking and focus on creating new renewable energy jobs, at the annual Labour Party conference yesterday. Renewable Energy Association (REA) chief executive Nina Skorupska said: “The UK is facing an extraordinary opportunity to be a core player in renewable and clean tech research, finance, and deployment. We fully agree with Labour’s forecast for the potential of 300,000 jobs, at least. The industry already employs over 115,000 people and has been growing at a rate twice as fast as the economy overall. “The decentralised nature of renewables means that a variety of skilled work will be required across the length and breadth of the UK. Decentralised energy also offers a new source of savings or revenue, over a million people in the UK are already doing so through solar PV, energy storage, EV’s and other tech.”
Utility Week 27th Sept 2016 read more »
Dear Jeremy Corbyn MP, Labour Leader, I am writing to you on behalf of Radiation Free Lakeland, a volunteer group based in Cumbria to thank you whole heartedly for pledging to ban fracking which “locks us into an energy infrastructure that is based on fossil fuels long after our country needs to have moved to clean energy”. We agree entirely with the case against fracking, as well as being fossil fuel based there are also radiation risks from unleashing large amounts of radon deep underground. The nuclear industry is, like fracking, extractive and extreme. But nuclear is in a league all of its own.
Radiation Free Lakeland 27th Sept 2016 read more »