The Anonymous Widower

Boris Baldrick’s Cunning Plan

This written statement to Parliament on the UK Government web site, is entitled Transport Update: Transpennine Route Upgrade.

It has been published by Grant Shapps and this is the sub-title.

Additional funding has been made available for the Transpennine route upgrade.

This is the complete statement.

Today 19 July 2022, the government has made available £959 million of additional funding to continue to progress the delivery of the ambitious Transpennine route upgrade.

This funding is a significant milestone and another step towards upgrading the key east-west rail artery across the north of England, to further this government’s levelling up and decarbonisation objectives.

In addition to progressing the design of aspects of the upgrade, this funding will enable further on-the-ground delivery of electrification and journey time improvement works, mostly west of Leeds.

One of the first tangible benefits will be enabling electric trains to run between Manchester and Stalybridge by the middle of the decade. We are also developing scope that will enable the Transpennine route upgrade to become the first phase of Northern Powerhouse Rail, including plans to unlock freight flows and take thousands of lorries off our roads.

We are also more than trebling the investment in the Transpennine route upgrade from £2.9 billion to between £9.0 billion and £11.5 billion.

This additional investment will enable the roll out of digital signalling technology, electrification of the full route and the provision of additional tracks for commercial and freight services, giving rail users more reliable, more punctual, more comfortable and greener rail journeys.

I have some thoughts.

It’s Not A Wish List, But A Reality

The last paragraph reads like a wish list.

This additional investment will enable the roll out of digital signalling technology, electrification of the full route and the provision of additional tracks for commercial and freight services, giving rail users more reliable, more punctual, more comfortable and greener rail journeys.

But it’s not a wish list, it’s what is to be done.

Where Will The Government Get Between Nine and Eleven-And-A-Half Billion Pounds?

It’s not the sort of small change that you have in a sock draw.

This document on the UK government web site, is entitled PM Opening Remarks At Press Conference With German Chancellor Olaf Scholz: 8 April 2022, where this is these three paragraphs.

We will also agree on the importance of weaning ourselves off dependence on Russian gas and oil, and ensuring that our energy security cannot be threatened by a rogue state.

This is not easy for any of us, and I applaud the seismic decisions taken by Olaf’s government to move Germany away from Russian hydrocarbons.

Today we have agreed to maximise the potential of the North Sea and collaborate on energy security and on renewables, where Germany and the UK lead the way in new technology.

So did Boris and Olaf sign the world’s first Green Alliance based on zero-carbon energy?

• They may not have signed an Alliance, but they have agreed on common actions.
• Over the last year or so, German money and technology has started to be more visible in our offshore wind farms.
• BP have been backed by German utility; enBW in some of their huge wind farms.
• Siemens Gamesa are providing a lot of wind turbines.
• Will German shipyards build the floats for floating wind farms?
• An interconnector between the Isle of Grain and Wilhelmshaven is planned.
• Rolls-Royce and its German subsidiary MTU are charging into battle against climate change.
• The Germans have taken a liking to ITM Power’s electrolysers to produce hydrogen.

I can see the North Sea or the German Ocean becoming Europe’s power station, with by 2030, a large amount of the energy not needed by the UK, being exported to the Continent, either as electricity or hydrogen.

The Germans could become our magische Geldbäume.

But unlike gas and oil, wind power in the North Sea won’t run out, as it’s renewable.

In How Britannia With Help From Her Friends Can Rule The Waves And The Wind, this was my conclusion.

Boris’s vision of the UK becoming a Saudi Arabia of wind is no fantasy of a man with massive dreams.

Standard floating wind turbines, with the possibility of also harvesting wave power could be assembled in ports along the coasts, towed into position and then connected up.

Several GW of wind-power capacity could probably be added each year to what would become the largest zero-carbon power station in the world.

By harvesting the power of the winds and waves in the seas around the British Isles it is an engineering and mathematical possibility, that could have been developed by any of those great visionary Victorian engineers like Armstrong, Bazalgette, Brunel and Reynolds, if they had had access to our modern technology.

Up Yours! Putin!

This energy and the money it provides will finance our infrastructure and our tax cuts.

July 19, 2022 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Boris Johnson, BP, Digital Signalling, Electrification, Floating Wind Power, Grant Shapps, Offshore Wind Power, Rolls-Royce, Rolls-Royce mtu, TransPennine Upgrade, Wilhelmshaven, Wind Power