Why Does This Stuff Matter To Me?

This first post in this new blog aims to explain why I've decided to augment my longstanding, and mostly research and fact-based, Beyond 60 web site with something more personal and discursive, and which is not embarrassed to admit that I'm starting from the position that I believe my 'home' is about to be spoiled, and I don't like it. More about 'home' later.

Now in July 2025, approaching 2 years since the November 2023 announcement that a huge solar farm was to be built, the impact on my 'home' of what was renamed the Great North Road Solar & Biodiversity Park (GNRSBP) for the Statutory Consultation stage of its development appears to have receded, see GNR SP with the whole 'south eastern quadrant' solar panel areas being removed by Elements Green from the CDO application they made to The Planning Inspectorate. So, for now at least, my walks across Muskham Vale are safe 😊.

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I ended up spending enormous amounts of time just trying to - initially via the SolarComment Google Group, and later specialising in map-based information items, to help kickstart local awareness and engagement with what the proposal would mean for us, especially across the area between North Muskham & Bathley. 

So, this blog got little attention, with just a couple of inline EDITS like the ones below, and an occasional self-standing post where my career background interests impelled me to write something. Henceforth, I intend to follow the 'This Stuff' scope I set initially for the blog with a wider frame of reference, starting with my most recent post.

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EDIT 21st February 2024, 14 weeks since this first post and now that I've put a link leading here from Great North Road Solar Park (GNRSP) to offer personal thoughts on the web page's content, my driver is "Don't get mad, be objective, know the facts, challenge the misinformation", so please read my later posts as well to put this initial emotional rant in context. It's still genuine, but I've calmed down ..

I don't know how to create an index of this blog, so I've added a few EDITS like the one above into this home page to provide pointers to places where I've developed some of the references I've made here.

The proposed development is - by any measure - a major development proposal in our back yard. I use the phrase deliberately, and I defy anyone to tell me they wouldn't ask probing questions if it was their own back yard about to be dumped on. 

In this blog I aim to explore "who benefits most from this proposal" ..... all energy proposals and decisions involve technical, environmental, financial & sociopolitical aspects .. and the Great North Road Solar Park (GNRSP) certainly does.

My view of the risks around projects like GNRSP was already forming back in the 1970s when I worked for the Institute of Geological Sciences, on a survey mapping gravel resources in the Thames Valley. I soon realised "the government", the landowners, the tenant farmers, and the unsuspecting local residents all had quite different attitudes to the probability that my drill rigs were helping to find the country's next generation of gravel pits. The parallels, here in 2023, are obvious.

In this picture from 1982, my final group of Blackpool College Environmental Science & Energy Resources students and I are at Windscale in Sellafield, at a time the public were against building nuclear, and coal was still King. Back in college we would have already covered solar and wind energy, practical work to assess our homes' insulation, and discussed Thatcher's policies on coal mining and her "rapid depletion" decision on North Sea oil & gas, as well as noting the growing level of atmospheric CO2.

EDIT 22nd February 2024, on the day of this visit in 1982, the UK still had an ambitious programme to capitalise on its pioneering civil nuclear industry, by building (and exporting) a number of AGR (Advanced Gas Reactors), the big mid-term target was to build commercial scale "breeder reactors" ... and we were expecting the tokamak development work at Culham to be part of the realisation of controlled nuclear fusion "within a decade or so" ... 4 decades later we are still waiting for controlled nuclear fusion, and the UK civil nuclear programme is struggling .. it's far from clear whether the Small Modular reactor potential will be realised ... nuclear build timescales are too slow to meet current energy supply threats. I'd love to think that the STEP Fusion Energy development that the UKAEA plans to undertake at the West Burton site will produce our long term energy solution, but ...

These young students were way ahead of the curve on these energy & environment issues, things that were on hardly anyone's agenda at the time. I've sometimes wondered what will have stuck with them in later life ... who knows, perhaps some of them - wherever they are - are now doing exactly the same thing that I aim to do here.

In 1983 my family and I moved to North Muskham when I came to manage the Engineering & Science department at what was then Newark Technical College. The department's main groups of students at that time were the young men who, no doubt having taken good advice from their school careers teachers to 'get a trade', were CEGB electrical and/or mechanical apprentices from the 2000MW coal-fired power stations all along the Trent. As a geologist I'd been down pits up in Lancashire of course, and I accompanied the CEGB lads down Nottinghamshire pits when they went to see where their home power stations' coal came from. In the CEGB, as in this contemporary National Coal Board advert, this was seen as a 'job for life'. It's all pretty much disappeared, just German-owned Staythorpe gas-fired power station left. Some jobs there, but most are lost. So, I've seen our nuclear industry neglected, and our mining industry destroyed, as a result of what I see as wrong-headed political decisions - short term, strategic failure - now compounded by the desperate commitments made by recent governments, not least by Boris Johnson, grandstanding at COP26. 

And now, in pursuit of a net-zero policy which is (whatever one's views on the nature of climate change are) very unlikely to have any significant influence on global climate change, we are being asked (perhaps told?) to go along with this. 

Those who just drive by on the A1 may wonder what the fuss is about, for me - minimal carbon footprint Johnny Walker, boots on the ground across these fields several days a week - it means for a substantial part of my walk I'll be walking alongside acres of aluminosilicate instead of crops - though, with 2.5m fences everywhere, I may not even see that! So, the next time there's a COVID-style flood of locals out in the countryside, using their Muskham Vale 'back yard' to keep healthy and sane, it will be a very different experience! 

Locked in for 40 years with compromised access to our countryside, North Muskham presently the 'home' of 3 generations of my family. There, I've said 'home' again, why? Well, it's worth noting that in practically every parish affected by this proposal there is a characteristic population structure, exemplified by that in North Muskham, in which 35-40% are 60+, and around 15% (including me) are 75+. We've made our homes here and, for the most part, have little option or desire to go anywhere else - so, even if the nation's net zero policy forces us to embrace this "Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project", we've every right to fight for the fullest possible mitigation of its damaging implementation effects.

I've been working my way through the 205-page developers' EIA Scoping Report document, looking carefully at the detail of what is proposed. You can see, in real-time, where I've got to so far in preparing my input to our Parish Council's request for parishioners' views by 30th November 2023. I've set up a walk on 26th November and invited parishioners to look at what impact GNSRP would have on the ground. 

Over the next months and years we're likely to face a juggernaut of technical & financial pressure to go along with our areas being fundamentally changed in character - my gut tells me we owe it to ourselves and our (grand)children to make sure the proposals are challenged, and the 'benefits' evaluated in a balanced way. 

I love MV (and Bathley)

Copy of post to Muskham Messenger on 27th November 2023

One summer evening in late August 1983, in the first week that Dani, our 4 year old Susie, and I had come to live in The Park, a neighbour Phil Tallon (a colleague of mine at Newark tech, whose wife Jackie had found our house for us) asked “Do you fancy a pint in Bathley?”. I’d no idea where Bathley was but, being a bit of a boozer at the time, I readily accepted. Phil said “there’s a nice path across the fields”, and that was my early introduction to North Muskham Footpath 1 and Bathley Footpath 8 – across the pedestrian crossing over the East Coast Main Line, and on across the fields to The Crown.

Jim Wishart has a knack for naming things and years later, when he coined the phrase “Muskham Vale” for the area back from the Trent to Bathley, for me it captured the sense of ‘home’ that my 1983 evening walk had instilled in me as, with the sun setting behind what over the years I jokingly told our kids were the “Muskham Alps”, I realised North Muskham was going to be a place that mattered to me. I believe it matters to the majority of our 1000 people – lifelongers like Ann Webb or Martin Talbot, or the many others who came here, liked it and stayed - and there’s never, since the A1 was rebuilt in the 1960s, been a proposal more likely to change our surroundings than the recently revealed (but long time in the hidden planning) “Great North Solar Park” project, a massive scale top-down big money project that, whatever one’s views on climate change and net zero are, I believe should absolutely be given our attention.

For the last 40 years I’ve been tramping around those same fields – for exercise, stress relief, fun and fascination with the seasonal changes you only really see when you go to the same places regularly. But, apart from walks with Dani (or in post-COVID time with folk signed up for the Muskham Secateurs), I’d never done the walk in a group of 16 (the attached photo was taken towards the end of yesterday’s Great North Road Solar Park walk, when 4 had taken shortcuts home, to avoid hypothermia in yesterday’s cold, or for other engagements), who turned up to have a look, on the ground, at what the recently announced solar farm project would look and likely feel like.

Thanks to those of you who turned up – I think everyone in the group had a slightly different reason for being there and I hope you’ll find a way to register what you think over coming days in any outstanding responses to the Parish Council’s request for your views by 30^th November – your views, for or against the project plans or (like me) “OK, part of this, but in properly planned people-friendly way” really are important. In the days of online petitions, WhatsApp decision making in closed groups, and X/Twitter, keeping quiet means we don’t count in the thinking of the powerful. For me, this issue is not about net-zero, it's about planning control - about having a view and a voice on things that affect us.

I think it’s safe to say that there aren’t only 16 of us wanting to know more about this proposal – if you would like to participate in a rerun of yesterday’s walk, email me at jgray.muskham@gmail.com. And please, those of you who did brave the cold yesterday, speak out with your thoughts in whatever way you feel comfortable – but make sure your thoughts get to your Parish Council (or Parish Meeting whose voices are being ignored just now and whose ability to insist on being listened to will be enhanced by every local response you make).

Doubts & Dilemmas, Climate & Energy

My first post in this blog said "I'm starting from the position that I believe my 'home' is about to be spoiled, and I don't like it." and that "...we owe it to ourselves and our (grand)children to make sure the [GNRSP] proposals are challenged, and the 'benefits' evaluated in a balanced way." That's not changed.

Can't thinkers also be deniers?

This 'Doubts & Dilemmas' blog entry - certain to be substantially edited and extended over coming weeks - has been prompted by the SolarComment conversation responding to our MP's 20/12/2023 letter (to see the contents of any SolarComment post you need to have signed up, just email jgray.muskham@gmail.com if you want to be added to the mailing list). 

EDIT 29th March, 2024 

The 'doubts and dilemmas' at national and international level have also been surfacing with great rapidity, and revealing unanticipated threats, since I first posted this item in December 2023. Just yesterday, I came across another - hardly discussed until now, events in Africa that have potential knock-on effects for our UK electricity supply.

As I read (and paraphrase) it, the conversation's central message boils down to the belief that "Climate is an [...] existential threat to all of us." and that politicians at all levels should therefore be encouraging us to fully support the UK's sacrificial net-zero policies. There are undoubtedly MILLIONS who completely support those policies, but I can't. My Earth Science background, and 55-year exposure to 'the science' won't let me, nor will my equally long personal experience of Cold War threats and European politics - and that's before I even begin to factor in net zero's economic impact, most felt by people a lot worse off than we are.

For me, it's the loss of secure and resilient energy supply that dominates, not net zero. In 2024 the most immediately obvious threat to energy security could be expressed "Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to all of us, and his willingness to take advantage of our self-inflicted energy supply vulnerability is a serious risk in the near term rather than in 2050". Alarmist? In recent weeks the Royal Navy and allies have become focused on threats to pipelines, and the interconnectors we depend on increasingly are undoubtedly targets for sabotage.

So, at the strategic level of national energy policy, I am (and have been since the 1980s) simultaneously pro-solar, pro-wind and pro-nuclear. At the same time I'm still shocked by the strategic lunacy of unilaterally destroying our coal industry, and the Trent valley generating capacity that it supported.  I am bemused to see our national energy policy dominated by the dunkleflaute-ignoring belief we can ever have a 100% solar/wind energy mix that gives energy security, whilst failing to access our known onshore frackable gas. 

However, at the 'operational' level, I just don't think it makes a great deal of sense to base our support for, or against, local Solar Park plans on our advocacy of net zero or energy security. That decision has already been taken, national policy calls for 70GW of new solar generating capacity and, even though net zero scepticism is growing, the National Infrastructure Planning process is designed to make it happen. The tramlines set down by The Planning Inspectorate (TPI) process which, with the developers' EIA Scoping Report now accepted by the TPI, will limit what counts as 'relevant' to their ultimate assessment of the Elements Green application

My own mantra of  "'Not 100% for, Not 100% against, More 'OK, some of this but in a way that respects our needs'" is just a pragmatic (though conflicted) response to how I see that process shaping up. My focus remains unashamedly on us achieving consensus-led outcomes that optimises community benefits by being very concerned to understand (and game) those aspects of the situation that 'the process' requires that we are consulted on.

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Today's Dunkelflaute, A Reminder

When I started this post, 1st December 2023, I had just done my regular (semi-daily) trip around the Chat Walk, under a leaden sky, with absolutely no wind, a weather condition that quite frequently occurs in mid-winter and, when it does, it tends to linger for an extended period - dead calm, very cold, lots of home heating switched on, lights coming on early. 

At such times, solar and wind energy are at their minimum, at the very time we need them most.

On the morning of 3rd December - to everyone's surprise - quite heavy overnight snow had given us a local view very much like this impression of a Solar Park future, Rick Gill Muskham Facebook post, another cold, overcast, zero wind morning.

The German word for such a condition is dunkelflaute – the power grid engineers’ nightmare. What do you do when it’s cold, there's no sunshine, and no wind … and you’ve given up on coal, gas, etc An excellent Deutsche Welle documentary clip explains. The whole documentary is worth watching, but – on a day of dunkelflaute like today – this bit really makes you think. Stick around till a German engineer gets put on the spot, his reply is ....

Up there in National Grid HQ have to find an alternative source for all the solar and wind energy they might normally count on being available, otherwise there would be disruptions of power supply.

There are two broad types of "alternative":-

1. energy stored from renewables that can be quickly released
2. energy from "conventional" sources like coal, gas and nuclear fission - but, contrary to expectation none of these can be switched off/on instantly

--- More to be added here as the project advances ----

Having checked the weather forecast, I'd arranged to do a second 'Solar Park Walk' for the morning of 3rd December, which was expected to be cold but dry. Given the surprisingly heavy snow, there wasn't really time to make sure everyone would see a cancellation message, I donned Arctic-suitable gear and arrived at the MRCC, not really expecting anyone - but there, just in case. Just as well, I was pleased to see James, one of my grandchildren, turn up.