Wasn’t it great to see Ralph Fiennes on Sunday with Laura Kuennsberg 11 February, in such eloquent and passionate form, what a terrific champion and knowledgeable advocate for the SEAS cause.
To make his film COAST and for this Laura Kuennsberg interview, he has shown incredible dedication, working with the SEAS team to get up to speed, understand all the complexities and prepare for potential questions, and he nailed it.
Ralph began in rapier sharp form by correcting Laura Kuennsberg’s statement that he had made a film about pylons (a common recent media mistake), saying the film doesn’t talk about pylons, it’s concerned with substations and the impact of proposed onshore infrastructure to connect electricity from offshore wind farms to the grid in Suffolk.
Ralph was shocked by the plans of National Grid and Scottish Power to create an energy superhub on the greenfield Suffolk coast, a place where he was born and feels deeply connected to. As Ralph puts it bringing the energy “into a huge massive super structure the size of 90 football pitches 30 m high… will have a devastating negative impact on local communities, farming, fishing, tourism, when it can be done better.”
There are better solutions that like SEAS, Ralph is excited by. The Belgians and Danes are building more of the transmission network infrastructure offshore creating offshore hubs, then importantly taking cabling onshore at brownfield sites, which is much more ecologically friendly and we should be doing this too.
National Grid claims it is more expensive, which might be true in the short term, but as Ralph puts it, this is about the legacy for our country and countryside for generations to come so it’s vital to get it right, and that we are convinced that it is cheaper in the medium and long-term (overall asset cost savings from pooling offshore giving fewer substations and cable trenches and significant constraint cost savings from taking power closer to where it is needed).
He added that he would continue campaigning and that it is essential to keep fighting, “it’s not just about Suffolk, this resonates through the country, this is how this country goes forward in building our clean energy infrastructure”.
“What is being proposed at the moment we think is a disaster” Read the BBC news report HERE
We have seen some tremendously supportive tweets including one calling for Ralph as Prime Minister!
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