This £200 million solar panel scheme for schools and hospitals is being paraded as some great leap forward when in reality it’s a textbook example of virtue signalling over substance. While politicians pat themselves on the back, they’re ignoring the harsh truth – this won’t make a dent in our actual energy crisis.
The NHS alone is hemorrhaging £1.4 billion a year on energy bills, more than double what it paid just a few years ago. Schools are being crushed under similar pressures. Against these staggering figures, a few solar panels here and there is like trying to put out a house fire with a water pistol.
The fundamental problem with this approach is that solar energy, while useful in its place, can’t provide the reliable baseload power we desperately need. It’s intermittent by nature – useless at night, unreliable in winter, and completely incapable of meeting the constant demands of hospitals that need power around the clock or schools trying to heat classrooms through a British winter. This isn’t about being anti-renewable, it’s about basic physics and economics. Until we have storage technology that doesn’t exist yet, renewables will always need fossil fuel backup.
What’s truly maddening is that we’re sitting on solutions while chasing fantasies. The North Sea still holds substantial reserves that could be developed if we stopped treating oil and gas companies like villains. Fracking could unlock domestic shale gas that would make us less dependent on foreign imports. Nuclear power offers clean, reliable baseload generation. Yet instead of pursuing these practical options, we get performative politics – slapping solar panels on a few buildings while the structural problems go unaddressed.
The net-zero obsession that’s driving these policies was always economically illiterate, and now even some Conservatives are starting to acknowledge that reality. But dialing back the rhetoric isn’t enough when we’re still shackled to policies that make us increasingly dependent on energy imports. Most of the oil we do produce gets exported because of refinery mismatches, while we import gas to meet domestic shortfalls. It’s energy policy designed by ideologues, not engineers.
The bitter irony is that even if we wanted to go all-in on renewables, our crumbling grid infrastructure can’t handle it. Projects face years of delays because the system is overloaded. Where’s the £200 million investment in fixing that bottleneck? Instead, we get photo ops and press releases about solar panels that will do little more than power a few lights and computers while the real energy demands continue to be met by the fossil fuels we’re not supposed to talk about.
This is what happens when symbolism trumps substance. Rather than making the hard choices about energy security, our leaders would rather be seen doing something – no matter how ineffective – than actually solving the problem. Schools and hospitals deserve better than being used as props in someone else’s political theater. They need reliable, affordable energy – not green window dressing that does nothing to address the fundamental issues. Until we’re willing to have that honest conversation, we’ll keep getting these pointless gestures instead of real solutions.
