Campaign groups No Pylons Lincolnshire and Lincolnshire Against Needless Destruction have issued a last-minute plea for residents to make their views known about National Grid’s 87-mile pylons plan.
The project is part of the Great Grid Upgrade and proposes an 87-mile line of new pylons through Lincolnshire from Grimsby to Walpole in Norfolk, including up to six new gigantic substations attracting other infrastructure such as solar developments, battery storage facilities and even new power stations.
The overhead cables will stream power from new sources, including wind farms off the coast of Scotland, through Lincolnshire to the energy-hungry Midlands and the South East.
Since the proposal was launched last spring much more has developed, including an additional substation at Weston Marsh to accommodate an additional cable link to East Leicestershire, and a 2,700-acre solar farm in South Holland.
Andrew Malkin, of NPL and LAND, said: “National Grid plc has been telling anyone attending its face-to-face consultation events that the new energy will be shared with Lincolnshire, but their own literature declares it is for the Midlands and the South East.
“The leader of South Holland District Council has said the area’s development is being held back by a lack of energy capacity, but there are no proposals to upgrade the local distribution network to address this. The Great Grid Upgrade will not actually benefit Lincolnshire.
“With the massive loss of farmland, threat to food security, industrialisation of a fragile landscape, thousands of HGV movements on rural roads over a five-year construction period, this is lose-lose for Lincolnshire.
“There are many examples of lives being ruined by these proposals – homes spoiled where people have lived for decades, grade one farmland being buried under tons of steel and concrete, a farm where it has taken years of work to attain organic status becoming unviable.
“We support clean, green, renewable energy, but the current proposals are the dirtiest way to help us achieve the net-zero ambition.
“We are pressing the need for a pause in this infrastructure rush in order to research alternatives, such as an integrated offshore grid, power generated closer to where it’s needed reducing intrusive overhead cabling, investigation, and perhaps research and development, of cable-ploughing technology, opposed to old-fashioned trenching, and much more use of rooftop solar.”
NPL and LAND has submitted its official response to the scheme but numbers of individual responses will count.
Views and concerns about the proposals can be emailed to National Grid before August 6.
There are objection templates on the websites: https://www.lincsland.co.uk/ and https://nopylons.co.uk/
No Pylons Lincolnshire (NPL) and Lincolnshire Against Needless Destruction (LAND)
