Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a £30 million funding package for what he is cheerfully calling “People’s Power” projects. The scheme promises to bring electricity generation to every postcode by allowing villages, towns, and cities to build and control their own clean energy supply. According to Downing Street, this will involve installing solar panels on public libraries, erecting publicly owned windfarms, and launching hydro schemes in local rivers. The stated goal is to put money back into people’s pockets while giving them a direct role in tackling the climate crisis. It is a deeply moving, beautifully optimistic vision of society, and it must be stopped immediately before these people blow us all to kingdom come.
Once again, I am forced to be the only adult in the room. I have spent the last two decades writing very stern columns explaining to the working class that they are individually responsible for the boiling of the oceans. I did not spend my entire career lecturing you about your carbon footprint so that you could suddenly decide you are qualified to manage a high-voltage, bidirectional electrical grid. The general public cannot be trusted to sort their household recycling without putting a greasy pizza box in the cardboard bin, and now we are handing them £30 million to play God with megawatts.
Let us examine the logistics of the community hydro scheme. Downing Street envisions wholesome parish councils harnessing the natural flow of their local streams to power the village hall. Have you ever attended a local council meeting? These are people who will launch a ten-year blood feud over the placement of a speed bump. If you give the residents of a Cotswolds village control of a hydro-electric dam, it will take precisely three days before they weaponise the reservoir to flood a neighbouring hamlet that voted the wrong way on a low-traffic neighbourhood.
I was discussing this very issue last month during a remarkably candid lunch with several top-tier executives at the COP summit in Dubai. Over a spread of sustainably sourced wagyu beef, we universally agreed that the transition to green energy requires serious, credentialed people. Real climate action requires complex financial instruments, deeply leveraged carbon offset markets, and the steady, heavily guarded hand of fossil fuel conglomerates who understand how to write a 400-page sustainability report. It does not involve Brenda from the Women’s Institute climbing onto the roof of the local leisure centre with a spanner and a photovoltaic cell.
The government also insists that this £30 million will fund solar panels on public libraries. This fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of the British public library, which is not to serve as the vanguard of the nation's net-zero transition, but rather to provide a dry place for teenagers to vape and for the elderly to use the free internet to read my columns. Asking our librarians to balance a localized energy load while simultaneously trying to stop someone from aggressively printing 400 pages of conspiracy theories is an abdication of state duty.
When you allow a village to harvest its own solar energy, you are brutally severing the vital, historic relationship between a freezing pensioner and the multinational conglomerate threatening to cut off her smart meter.
Furthermore, giving communities direct control over their own electricity supply presents a catastrophic threat to the established economic order. If a town generates its own power and puts money back in its own pockets, it actively deprives our vital energy monopolies of the record-breaking quarterly profits they desperately need to fund their greenwashing campaigns. How exactly is BP supposed to sponsor an exhibit on the wonders of algae at the Science Museum if the residents of Greater Manchester are quietly powering their own kettles for free?
Then there is the sheer disrespect shown to our privatised water sector. The rivers of this nation rightfully belong to Thames Water and United Utilities, who have earned the exclusive right to fill them with raw sewage. Encouraging locals to interrupt that delicate ecological balance by installing community hydro turbines is a slap in the face to the shareholders who have worked so hard to extract dividends from those very waters.
I will be keeping my thermostat at a crisp 22 degrees this winter, safe in the knowledge that my exorbitant bill is being paid directly to a faceless corporate entity with a proper offshore tax structure. I suggest the Prime Minister abandons this naive populist fantasy and leaves the climate crisis where it belongs: in the capable hands of the people who created it.