Tories want free energy for people living near wind farms 

Communities living near new onshore wind turbines and solar farms should be given 100 per cent discounts on their energy bills, Tory MPs have said.

The 1922 backbench committee on business, energy and industrial strategy has recommended a tiered system to provide an incentive and compensate people for renewable energy facilities.

It says all new onshore wind farms and solar farms should be subject to a local referendum. Those living within a mile of a proposed scheme should be given free energy, it argues. Those within three miles should get a 50 per cent discount and those within four miles 25 per cent over the lifetime of the project.

Rishi Sunak was forced to drop the Conservative Party’s moratorium on new onshore wind turbines after a revolt by Tory MPs, including the former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Construction of turbines in England has in effect been banned since 2015 under planning restrictions introduced under David Cameron, who said people were “fed up” with them.

More than 50 Tory MPs, including Johnson and Truss, have been pushing for an end to the ban as part of efforts to boost growth and make Britain more independent in energy.

The government will consult on allowing turbines to be built if they have local support and as long as concerns about their impact have been “satisfactorily addressed”.

The 1922 committee on business and energy has set out plans for a compensation scheme because onshore wind turbines “typically cause more disruption and adversely affect more people” than offshore wind turbines.

The committee, led by Dame Andrea Leadsom, the former business secretary, also recommends “local pricing” that would give people lower bills based on the presence of renewable energy.

“Prices would vary across the country, depending on local supply and demand,” the report states. “For example, on sunny days electricity prices in Cornwall would be lower because there are lots of solar farms there. Similarly, on windy days electricity prices in Scotland would be lower due to high output from Scottish wind farms. One consequence of local pricing is that generators and customers would be encouraged to use more electricity when local supplies are high and less when local supplies are low.”

Other recommendations include stopping payments for wind farms that turn off when it is too windy because there is too much energy supply. The committee says this approach would give energy companies an incentive to invest in more storage.

It also suggests that all white goods, such as dishwashers and washing machines, should be “smart as standard”, enabling their use to be focused on periods when energy is cheapest.

The MPs urge Sunak to make good on his pledge during the Tory leadership campaign to introduce a new department for energy. Sunak abandoned many of the promises he made during the campaign in the wake of the market turbulence caused by Truss’s brief premiership.

The MPs say there should be a new energy department with a secretary of state and three junior ministers focused on energy security, affordability and decarbonisation.

“Urgent government action on promoting domestic energy generation and on facilitating energy demand reduction requires significant leadership focus on the entire energy brief,” the report says. “It should be separated out from the rest of BEIS, with its own secretary of state and with a clear mandate to resolve the UK’s energy trilemma.”