Correction Oops. Due to being upset by the time change, my excuse and I am sticking to it, I said clocks went backwards but of course they leapt forwd one hour. All the more reason for abandoning the habit of changing clocks twice a year. Original article Morning, if you are awake yet. Did you oversleep? Take a lie in? Or rush to work an hours earlier than usual. Overnight at 1am the clocks went back to midnight, cutting an hour off the night hours. Digital clocks will have adjusted automatically. Many people will be adjusting their analogue clocks. A few won’t bother and will allow for the extra hour. The twice annual changing of the clocks is a century or so old practice conducted without ceremony. The concept was daylight saving, getting more daylight in conventional working hours. These days there is no such thing as conventional hours. It […]
Tag: energy
Energy Storage unit proposed in field at Rock Farm, Ludford
Energy Reservoir 13 Ltd is hoping to build an electricity storage unit on green fields near Lower Ledwyche. A storage system is a good idea. But why isn’t it being built alongside the existing substation rather than in a green field?
New data shows Shropshire has a middling record on renewable energy but is top for biodigestion
A year or so before I moved to Shropshire, I drove from Oxfordshire to visit the biodigester on Coder Road. The plant was a work of wonder, new technology that turned food and farm waste into compost, generating gas and electricity in the process. The biodigester has since been shut down but anaerobic digestion has remained a significant green industry around Ludlow. The last I heard, the biodigester industry employed nearly 150 people in the Ludlow area. It is not surprise therefore to learn that by March last year, Shropshire topped the league table of local authority areas with capacity to generate electricity from anaerobic digestion. It was also ranked third for producing heat from biomass. For all forms of renewable energy, Shropshire was ranked ninth out of the 348 local authorities in England and Wales.[1] That’s not a bad track record.
We should not be losing solar farm appeals in South Shropshire
I am disappointed and rather angry that a planning inspector has allowed a solar farm to go ahead above Neen Sollars, near Cleobury Mortimer. I don’t think that this appeal needed to have been lost. The Neen Sollars decision follows the approval by another planning inspector of a solar farm at Acton Scott. A decision on an application for a solar farm at Whitton is due any day. I fear for the result. All three solar farm applications were turned down by the South Planning Committee against the advice of officers. In all three cases, councillors have subsequently been excluded from the appeal process. The council’s case was submitted after the planning inspectorate deadline for two of the three appeals. To me this suggests that the technical documentation was prepared under hurried pressure. And for all three applications, the appeal case has been written by the same planning team that […]
Ministers are thinking of nationalising planning decisions on fracking – I’m asking Shropshire Council to lobby for local decisions
Thanks to the dozens of people who have emailed me a standard letter expressing concerns about fracking. This polluting technology has no place on our small crowded island. It has no role in a world where countries are already being decimated by climate change. I’ve put forward a motion to Shropshire Council, seconded by Kevin Turley, to ask it to lobby for local control of fracking planning applications. The standard email was triggered by an article in the Telegraph. This revealed that energy secretary Amber Rudd, communities secretary Greg Clark and environment chief Liz Truss wrote to George Osborne last summer. They requested that fracking should to be brought into the Planning Act 2008 regime for national infrastructure projects. That would means that applications would not be determined locally but by the planning inspectorate in Bristol. We would lose all local control.