Tesla Energy’s new mains power battery has just transformed the energy market – giving a huge boost to small scale renewable energy and killing off both fossil fuelled and nuclear power in the process.

The announcement of its two domestic-scale lithium batteries, rated at 7kWh and 10kWh of energy storage was widely trailed.

But what no one expected was the price – which came in at a half to a quarter of market expectations: “Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.”

And according to energy analyst Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, that equates to a life-cycle cost of about $0,02 per kWh stored and released, or a little over 1p in UK money.

And that is transformational. With grid power prices typically 14p / kWh in the UK, or $0.12 in the US, it’s just a fraction of the cost of buying power in – for the first making it economic for small scale generators to ‘save and re-use’ their power surpluses.

Selling cheap, buying dear – no longer!

Currently power users with solar panels or wind turbines get paid just a few pence for every kWh (that’s one kilowatt of electrical power for one hour) they dump into the grid. So the main value they get (in addition to any feed-in tariff) is that while the sun is shining or the wind blowing, they get ‘free’ electricity.

The problem comes when there’s no sunshine or wind – and then they have to buy high-priced power in off the grid. But now with the Tesla battery system they will be able to store any power surplus to their needs – dumping less power onto the grid, and buying less in.

And that’s just what Tesla’s battery is designed to do. It can “provide a number of different benefits to the customer”, writes Tesla, including:

• “Load shifting – The battery can provide financial savings to its owner by charging during low rate periods when demand for electricity is lower and discharging during more expensive rate periods when electricity demand is higher
• “Increasing self-consumption of solar power generation – The battery can store surplus solar energy not used at the time it is generated and use that energy later when the sun is not shining
• “Back-up power – Assures power in the event of an outage.”

As they do this technology adopters will slash the money they spend buying grid electricity. And if enough people do it (as they surely will as prices continue to fall) the entire business model of centralized power generators is doomed as sales falls, fixed costs have to be shared among a dwindling pool of customers, and the incentive to ‘go renewable’ increases.

But the revolution doesn’t stop there!

It’s not just domestic-scale generators that can benefit from the technology – large utility-scale renewable power generators can also get in on the act by installing banks of batteries at solar and wind farm sites – holding back electricity when the price is low, and selling it when the price is high.

And yes, Tesla has a product for them too: “For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power.”

Result: returns to wind and solar investors go up, making wind and solar power even more competitive against fossil-generated electricity than they already are. In the process renewable generators will also stabilise the grid, playing a big part in ensuring that, second to second, power supply matches demand.

And as they do this it will cut away life support from coal and gas fired plants that are currently paid to step in and make good any fall-off in power from renewable generators, or meet demand surges from power users.

Good news for everyone … almost everyone

And that’s good news for everyone. Except the owners of the fossil fuel plants, that is, and the extractive industries that supply their fuel.

Oh yes, and nuclear power operators. The nuclear industry argues that of all the ‘low carbon‘ power sources only nuclear can supply ‘base load’ demand, day in, day out. In fact the claim is highly dubious – not least because all nuclear plants are prone to sudden emergency cut-outs that require a huge ‘spinning reserve’ as backup.

But that, they argue, justified the very high prices consumers are forced to pay for their electricity. The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear power plant is set to receive about double the current wholesale price for power, index linked, for 35 years after it goes into production, at least a decade in the future (if indeed it ever does).

But with cheap battery power now, why bother? As wind and solar power get cheaper all the time, and now battery costs are collapsing into the bargain, nuclear power represents a very slow, expensive and completely inflexible solution to a ‘problem’ that no longer exists.

The end of the big centralized power generators and their nuclear and fossil fuelled plants is no longer in doubt: it’s not ‘if’, but ‘when?’ Will they last out another decade? As revenues, investor confidence and future prospects ebb away, it’s hard to see how.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Tesla Energy’s new mains power battery has just transformed the energy market – giving a huge boost to small scale renewable energy and killing off both fossil fuelled and nuclear power in the process.

The announcement of its two domestic-scale lithium batteries, rated at 7kWh and 10kWh of energy storage was widely trailed.

But what no one expected was the price – which came in at a half to a quarter of market expectations: “Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.”

And according to energy analyst Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, that equates to a life-cycle cost of about $0,02 per kWh stored and released, or a little over 1p in UK money.

And that is transformational. With grid power prices typically 14p / kWh in the UK, or $0.12 in the US, it’s just a fraction of the cost of buying power in – for the first making it economic for small scale generators to ‘save and re-use’ their power surpluses.

Selling cheap, buying dear – no longer!

Currently power users with solar panels or wind turbines get paid just a few pence for every kWh (that’s one kilowatt of electrical power for one hour) they dump into the grid. So the main value they get (in addition to any feed-in tariff) is that while the sun is shining or the wind blowing, they get ‘free’ electricity.

The problem comes when there’s no sunshine or wind – and then they have to buy high-priced power in off the grid. But now with the Tesla battery system they will be able to store any power surplus to their needs – dumping less power onto the grid, and buying less in.

And that’s just what Tesla’s battery is designed to do. It can “provide a number of different benefits to the customer”, writes Tesla, including:

• “Load shifting – The battery can provide financial savings to its owner by charging during low rate periods when demand for electricity is lower and discharging during more expensive rate periods when electricity demand is higher
• “Increasing self-consumption of solar power generation – The battery can store surplus solar energy not used at the time it is generated and use that energy later when the sun is not shining
• “Back-up power – Assures power in the event of an outage.”

As they do this technology adopters will slash the money they spend buying grid electricity. And if enough people do it (as they surely will as prices continue to fall) the entire business model of centralized power generators is doomed as sales falls, fixed costs have to be shared among a dwindling pool of customers, and the incentive to ‘go renewable’ increases.

But the revolution doesn’t stop there!

It’s not just domestic-scale generators that can benefit from the technology – large utility-scale renewable power generators can also get in on the act by installing banks of batteries at solar and wind farm sites – holding back electricity when the price is low, and selling it when the price is high.

And yes, Tesla has a product for them too: “For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power.”

Result: returns to wind and solar investors go up, making wind and solar power even more competitive against fossil-generated electricity than they already are. In the process renewable generators will also stabilise the grid, playing a big part in ensuring that, second to second, power supply matches demand.

And as they do this it will cut away life support from coal and gas fired plants that are currently paid to step in and make good any fall-off in power from renewable generators, or meet demand surges from power users.

Good news for everyone … almost everyone

And that’s good news for everyone. Except the owners of the fossil fuel plants, that is, and the extractive industries that supply their fuel.

Oh yes, and nuclear power operators. The nuclear industry argues that of all the ‘low carbon‘ power sources only nuclear can supply ‘base load’ demand, day in, day out. In fact the claim is highly dubious – not least because all nuclear plants are prone to sudden emergency cut-outs that require a huge ‘spinning reserve’ as backup.

But that, they argue, justified the very high prices consumers are forced to pay for their electricity. The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear power plant is set to receive about double the current wholesale price for power, index linked, for 35 years after it goes into production, at least a decade in the future (if indeed it ever does).

But with cheap battery power now, why bother? As wind and solar power get cheaper all the time, and now battery costs are collapsing into the bargain, nuclear power represents a very slow, expensive and completely inflexible solution to a ‘problem’ that no longer exists.

The end of the big centralized power generators and their nuclear and fossil fuelled plants is no longer in doubt: it’s not ‘if’, but ‘when?’ Will they last out another decade? As revenues, investor confidence and future prospects ebb away, it’s hard to see how.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Tesla Energy’s new mains power battery has just transformed the energy market – giving a huge boost to small scale renewable energy and killing off both fossil fuelled and nuclear power in the process.

The announcement of its two domestic-scale lithium batteries, rated at 7kWh and 10kWh of energy storage was widely trailed.

But what no one expected was the price – which came in at a half to a quarter of market expectations: “Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.”

And according to energy analyst Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, that equates to a life-cycle cost of about $0,02 per kWh stored and released, or a little over 1p in UK money.

And that is transformational. With grid power prices typically 14p / kWh in the UK, or $0.12 in the US, it’s just a fraction of the cost of buying power in – for the first making it economic for small scale generators to ‘save and re-use’ their power surpluses.

Selling cheap, buying dear – no longer!

Currently power users with solar panels or wind turbines get paid just a few pence for every kWh (that’s one kilowatt of electrical power for one hour) they dump into the grid. So the main value they get (in addition to any feed-in tariff) is that while the sun is shining or the wind blowing, they get ‘free’ electricity.

The problem comes when there’s no sunshine or wind – and then they have to buy high-priced power in off the grid. But now with the Tesla battery system they will be able to store any power surplus to their needs – dumping less power onto the grid, and buying less in.

And that’s just what Tesla’s battery is designed to do. It can “provide a number of different benefits to the customer”, writes Tesla, including:

• “Load shifting – The battery can provide financial savings to its owner by charging during low rate periods when demand for electricity is lower and discharging during more expensive rate periods when electricity demand is higher
• “Increasing self-consumption of solar power generation – The battery can store surplus solar energy not used at the time it is generated and use that energy later when the sun is not shining
• “Back-up power – Assures power in the event of an outage.”

As they do this technology adopters will slash the money they spend buying grid electricity. And if enough people do it (as they surely will as prices continue to fall) the entire business model of centralized power generators is doomed as sales falls, fixed costs have to be shared among a dwindling pool of customers, and the incentive to ‘go renewable’ increases.

But the revolution doesn’t stop there!

It’s not just domestic-scale generators that can benefit from the technology – large utility-scale renewable power generators can also get in on the act by installing banks of batteries at solar and wind farm sites – holding back electricity when the price is low, and selling it when the price is high.

And yes, Tesla has a product for them too: “For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power.”

Result: returns to wind and solar investors go up, making wind and solar power even more competitive against fossil-generated electricity than they already are. In the process renewable generators will also stabilise the grid, playing a big part in ensuring that, second to second, power supply matches demand.

And as they do this it will cut away life support from coal and gas fired plants that are currently paid to step in and make good any fall-off in power from renewable generators, or meet demand surges from power users.

Good news for everyone … almost everyone

And that’s good news for everyone. Except the owners of the fossil fuel plants, that is, and the extractive industries that supply their fuel.

Oh yes, and nuclear power operators. The nuclear industry argues that of all the ‘low carbon‘ power sources only nuclear can supply ‘base load’ demand, day in, day out. In fact the claim is highly dubious – not least because all nuclear plants are prone to sudden emergency cut-outs that require a huge ‘spinning reserve’ as backup.

But that, they argue, justified the very high prices consumers are forced to pay for their electricity. The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear power plant is set to receive about double the current wholesale price for power, index linked, for 35 years after it goes into production, at least a decade in the future (if indeed it ever does).

But with cheap battery power now, why bother? As wind and solar power get cheaper all the time, and now battery costs are collapsing into the bargain, nuclear power represents a very slow, expensive and completely inflexible solution to a ‘problem’ that no longer exists.

The end of the big centralized power generators and their nuclear and fossil fuelled plants is no longer in doubt: it’s not ‘if’, but ‘when?’ Will they last out another decade? As revenues, investor confidence and future prospects ebb away, it’s hard to see how.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Tesla Energy’s new mains power battery has just transformed the energy market – giving a huge boost to small scale renewable energy and killing off both fossil fuelled and nuclear power in the process.

The announcement of its two domestic-scale lithium batteries, rated at 7kWh and 10kWh of energy storage was widely trailed.

But what no one expected was the price – which came in at a half to a quarter of market expectations: “Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.”

And according to energy analyst Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, that equates to a life-cycle cost of about $0,02 per kWh stored and released, or a little over 1p in UK money.

And that is transformational. With grid power prices typically 14p / kWh in the UK, or $0.12 in the US, it’s just a fraction of the cost of buying power in – for the first making it economic for small scale generators to ‘save and re-use’ their power surpluses.

Selling cheap, buying dear – no longer!

Currently power users with solar panels or wind turbines get paid just a few pence for every kWh (that’s one kilowatt of electrical power for one hour) they dump into the grid. So the main value they get (in addition to any feed-in tariff) is that while the sun is shining or the wind blowing, they get ‘free’ electricity.

The problem comes when there’s no sunshine or wind – and then they have to buy high-priced power in off the grid. But now with the Tesla battery system they will be able to store any power surplus to their needs – dumping less power onto the grid, and buying less in.

And that’s just what Tesla’s battery is designed to do. It can “provide a number of different benefits to the customer”, writes Tesla, including:

• “Load shifting – The battery can provide financial savings to its owner by charging during low rate periods when demand for electricity is lower and discharging during more expensive rate periods when electricity demand is higher
• “Increasing self-consumption of solar power generation – The battery can store surplus solar energy not used at the time it is generated and use that energy later when the sun is not shining
• “Back-up power – Assures power in the event of an outage.”

As they do this technology adopters will slash the money they spend buying grid electricity. And if enough people do it (as they surely will as prices continue to fall) the entire business model of centralized power generators is doomed as sales falls, fixed costs have to be shared among a dwindling pool of customers, and the incentive to ‘go renewable’ increases.

But the revolution doesn’t stop there!

It’s not just domestic-scale generators that can benefit from the technology – large utility-scale renewable power generators can also get in on the act by installing banks of batteries at solar and wind farm sites – holding back electricity when the price is low, and selling it when the price is high.

And yes, Tesla has a product for them too: “For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power.”

Result: returns to wind and solar investors go up, making wind and solar power even more competitive against fossil-generated electricity than they already are. In the process renewable generators will also stabilise the grid, playing a big part in ensuring that, second to second, power supply matches demand.

And as they do this it will cut away life support from coal and gas fired plants that are currently paid to step in and make good any fall-off in power from renewable generators, or meet demand surges from power users.

Good news for everyone … almost everyone

And that’s good news for everyone. Except the owners of the fossil fuel plants, that is, and the extractive industries that supply their fuel.

Oh yes, and nuclear power operators. The nuclear industry argues that of all the ‘low carbon‘ power sources only nuclear can supply ‘base load’ demand, day in, day out. In fact the claim is highly dubious – not least because all nuclear plants are prone to sudden emergency cut-outs that require a huge ‘spinning reserve’ as backup.

But that, they argue, justified the very high prices consumers are forced to pay for their electricity. The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear power plant is set to receive about double the current wholesale price for power, index linked, for 35 years after it goes into production, at least a decade in the future (if indeed it ever does).

But with cheap battery power now, why bother? As wind and solar power get cheaper all the time, and now battery costs are collapsing into the bargain, nuclear power represents a very slow, expensive and completely inflexible solution to a ‘problem’ that no longer exists.

The end of the big centralized power generators and their nuclear and fossil fuelled plants is no longer in doubt: it’s not ‘if’, but ‘when?’ Will they last out another decade? As revenues, investor confidence and future prospects ebb away, it’s hard to see how.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Tesla Energy’s new mains power battery has just transformed the energy market – giving a huge boost to small scale renewable energy and killing off both fossil fuelled and nuclear power in the process.

The announcement of its two domestic-scale lithium batteries, rated at 7kWh and 10kWh of energy storage was widely trailed.

But what no one expected was the price – which came in at a half to a quarter of market expectations: “Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3,500 for 10kWh and $3,000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.”

And according to energy analyst Arnie Gunderson of Fairewinds Energy Education, that equates to a life-cycle cost of about $0,02 per kWh stored and released, or a little over 1p in UK money.

And that is transformational. With grid power prices typically 14p / kWh in the UK, or $0.12 in the US, it’s just a fraction of the cost of buying power in – for the first making it economic for small scale generators to ‘save and re-use’ their power surpluses.

Selling cheap, buying dear – no longer!

Currently power users with solar panels or wind turbines get paid just a few pence for every kWh (that’s one kilowatt of electrical power for one hour) they dump into the grid. So the main value they get (in addition to any feed-in tariff) is that while the sun is shining or the wind blowing, they get ‘free’ electricity.

The problem comes when there’s no sunshine or wind – and then they have to buy high-priced power in off the grid. But now with the Tesla battery system they will be able to store any power surplus to their needs – dumping less power onto the grid, and buying less in.

And that’s just what Tesla’s battery is designed to do. It can “provide a number of different benefits to the customer”, writes Tesla, including:

• “Load shifting – The battery can provide financial savings to its owner by charging during low rate periods when demand for electricity is lower and discharging during more expensive rate periods when electricity demand is higher
• “Increasing self-consumption of solar power generation – The battery can store surplus solar energy not used at the time it is generated and use that energy later when the sun is not shining
• “Back-up power – Assures power in the event of an outage.”

As they do this technology adopters will slash the money they spend buying grid electricity. And if enough people do it (as they surely will as prices continue to fall) the entire business model of centralized power generators is doomed as sales falls, fixed costs have to be shared among a dwindling pool of customers, and the incentive to ‘go renewable’ increases.

But the revolution doesn’t stop there!

It’s not just domestic-scale generators that can benefit from the technology – large utility-scale renewable power generators can also get in on the act by installing banks of batteries at solar and wind farm sites – holding back electricity when the price is low, and selling it when the price is high.

And yes, Tesla has a product for them too: “For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power.”

Result: returns to wind and solar investors go up, making wind and solar power even more competitive against fossil-generated electricity than they already are. In the process renewable generators will also stabilise the grid, playing a big part in ensuring that, second to second, power supply matches demand.

And as they do this it will cut away life support from coal and gas fired plants that are currently paid to step in and make good any fall-off in power from renewable generators, or meet demand surges from power users.

Good news for everyone … almost everyone

And that’s good news for everyone. Except the owners of the fossil fuel plants, that is, and the extractive industries that supply their fuel.

Oh yes, and nuclear power operators. The nuclear industry argues that of all the ‘low carbon‘ power sources only nuclear can supply ‘base load’ demand, day in, day out. In fact the claim is highly dubious – not least because all nuclear plants are prone to sudden emergency cut-outs that require a huge ‘spinning reserve’ as backup.

But that, they argue, justified the very high prices consumers are forced to pay for their electricity. The UK’s planned Hinkley C nuclear power plant is set to receive about double the current wholesale price for power, index linked, for 35 years after it goes into production, at least a decade in the future (if indeed it ever does).

But with cheap battery power now, why bother? As wind and solar power get cheaper all the time, and now battery costs are collapsing into the bargain, nuclear power represents a very slow, expensive and completely inflexible solution to a ‘problem’ that no longer exists.

The end of the big centralized power generators and their nuclear and fossil fuelled plants is no longer in doubt: it’s not ‘if’, but ‘when?’ Will they last out another decade? As revenues, investor confidence and future prospects ebb away, it’s hard to see how.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

“Every election is a referendum. The winner is the person who sets the question.”

This mantra, passed from campaign manager to campaign manager down the generations, is key to understanding how political communication works. You don’t win by having the best answer. You win by setting the question.

Again and again in this election we see this from the Tory-media complex. And perhaps the most profound example has been the series of letters, co-ordinated by the Conservative Campaign HQ, in which business bosses tell us that we must support the Tories for the sake of the economy.

These missives have acted as vertebrae studded up the spine of Osborne’s campaign: holding it up, keeping it straight. They’ve ensured that the media has a series of new ‘events’ to talk about, relating to their one core subject, the economy.

Defining the debate is the first step to ‘winning’ it

It’s not that they make detailed arguments about national economic strategy, never mind that they win those arguments. It’s enough that they ensure we are talking about it: it’s the one major area where voters trust the Tories more.

The grip of CCHQ over the debate in this election is in part a product of the ownership of our media, in part a question of Britain’s traditional old boys’ networks, and in part a consequence of the power of money on our broader political infrastructure.

But it can also, to a significant extent, be pinned down to one piece of legislation: a law which received Royal Assent on the 30th of January 2014, specifically designed to muffle to voices of the voiceless.

The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 or, ‘The Gagging Act’ to its friends, was first mooted as a solution to a problem which really does exist.

Paid lobbyists attempting to be the back seat drivers of our government undermine democracy and have delivered more than one scandal in recent years. The Act, though, does nothing to deal with them.

Stifling the democratic debate

What it has done instead is gag civil society in the run up to the election. By restricting the ability to say anything which may be interpreted as favouring or disadvantage any major party, it’s preventing charities and NGOs from raising vital questions. It’s stopping them from broadening the focus of the vote from that chosen by the Tories and their pet journalists to the daily worries of the most vulnerable in our society.

Perhaps the most damaging element of it is that, if a particular policy is more associated with one party than with others, then you’re covered by the Lobbying Act. As one staffer at a prominent charity said to me,

“if UKIP denies climate change, does that mean you are disadvantaging them by saying that it’s a problem? If you’re concerned about inequality, does that mean we’re unfairly helping Labour if we mention it?”

I’ve spoken to a number of people across the voluntary sector, discussing the effect of the legislation. Every conversation started the same way: neither individuals nor organisations wanted to be identified for fear of reprisal – including from an increasingly politicised Charity Commission. But they all told me the same thing.

Again and again, senior staff at major charities and NGOs said that the Lobbying Act is stopping them from doing what they see as their jobs. For months now, they told me, it’s been raised at almost every meeting they’ve had with their partner organisations.

Large charities with legal teams are spending valuable resource on getting every statement cross-checked. Small charities, those, say, who represent people with particular illnesses, can’t afford to do this. And so too often, they say nothing at all.

Fracking? What fracking?

There are some stark examples. Five years ago, the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition ran a major campaign calling on the millions of members of their various organisations to “ask the climate question” at hustings or on the doorstep. Many did, influencing the election in a range of ways.

This time round, the big issue is fracking. However, as one person involved told me, they “had to make a decision that they wouldn’t say or do anything on fracking during the election period.”

I’m told that another charity, one which supports people with a common and life changing illness, used to organise hustings in general elections – giving patients and their families a chance to grill candidates about what they would do. This time around, they’ve not done so. They believe that the Lobbying Act prohibits it, though the law is so badly drafted, they aren’t sure, and can’t afford the lawyers to prove it. 

Huge numbers of Lib Dem MPs represent seats with significant student populations. Given the anger at their capitulation on fees, you can imagine how students’ unions might have been encouraging their members to ask awkward questions in recent weeks. Many have speculated that it was this fear which motivated the party to back an astoundingly illiberal prohibition on the freedom to speak in the weeks before the vote.

This level of uncertainty about the law is also a common theme. Some groups have reacted to it more boldly, choosing to interpreting the legislation narrowly and almost daring the Charity or Electoral Commission to tackle them.

Others are cautious, perhaps overly so, fearing any reprisals if they do overstep some as yet undefined line and find themselves in trouble. The overall effect, though, is notable.

Business as usual – for business

When we compare all of this to the prominent role played by those business letters, it becomes even starker. Businesses aren’t restricted by the legislation. They are free to act as proxies for the Tories. Charities, of course, wouldn’t be permitted to react in kind – it’s long been illegal for them to endorse a political party. But as one senior campaigner at a major anti-poverty charity put it to me,

“It’s galling to see the heads of the biggest, richest organisations in the UK speaking out, but those who represent the poorest and most vulnerable are not able to speak out.”

The de-politicisation of charities and NGOs is a much longer story than this one Act. In 2011, I wrote about how Labour had encouraged charities to become dependent on state funding for service delivery, and how this sweetened milk had rotted their teeth ahead of the battle against austerity, made them unable to bite the hand that now fed them.

But if the once powerful beasts of our civil society were made soft by Labour, they have been caged by the Coalition.

The impact is profound. The organisations which exist to speak up for the most vulnerable have been gagged by politicians who knew what they they would tell us in this election if only they could.

The spokespeople for the rich and powerful have a bigger podium than ever, but the representatives of the oppressed have had the soap box kicked from under them, just when those they represent needed it most.

Every election is a referendum. The winner is the person who sets the question. And if you fear that the people might want talk about something other than what you want them to talk about, pass a law banning civil society from asking awkward questions.

Adam Ramsay is the Co-Editor of openDemocracy’s OurKingdom and also works with Bright Green. Before, he was a full time campaigner with People & Planet. You can follow him at @adamramsay. To support the work of OurKingdom click here.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.

The Ukrainian National Guard has been put on high alert due to worsening forest fires around the crippled Chernobyl nuclear power plant, according to Ukraine Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

“The forest fire situation around the Chernobyl power plant has escalated”, a statement on Avakov’s Facebook page says.

“The forest fire is heading in the direction of Chernobyl’s installations. Treetop flames and strong gusts of wind have created a real danger of the fire spreading to an area within 20 kilometers of the power plant. There are about 400 hectares [988 acres] of forests in the endangered area.”

He added that there was “reasonable suspicion of intentional arson” since fires had been ignited on both sides of the river.

Police and National Guard units are on high alert. Ukraine’s Prime Minister personally went to the affected area to oversee the firefighting. He says the situation is under control, “but this is the biggest fire since 1992.”

However, in comments to Russia’s Moscow Speaks radio, a representative of Greenpeace Russia said that the situation is much worse:

“A very large, catastrophic forest fire is taking place in a 30-km zone around the Chernobyl power plant. We estimate the real area of the fire to be 10,000 hectares; this is based on satellite images. This hasn’t been officially acknowledged yet.”

Serious radiation risk from re-suspended ‘hot particles’

The potential danger in this fire comes from the radioactive contaminants the burning plants have absorbed, Christopher Busby, scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, told RT.

“Some of the materials that were contaminating that area would have been incorporated into the woods. In other words, they land on the ground in 1986 and they get absorbed into the trees and all the biosphere.

“And when it burns, they just become re-suspended. It’s like Chernobyl all over again. All of that material that fell on the ground will now be burned up into the air and will become available for people to breathe.

“Internal radiation from inhalation is very much more dangerous than the background radiation that comes off the ground”, added Dr Busby. “People should stay inside. It’s extremely serious. They should not go outside and breathe the air.

“This stuff will remain airborne and there will be radioactive particles that can be inhaled. These particles can travel for great distances – its a serious matter if these particles become volatilised in the intense heat that these fires produce. It is quite a serious health hazard.”

Huge accumulation of plutonium in radioactive forest litter

Adding to the ferocity of both the fire and the radiation is the fact that the normal decomposing operation of fungi, bacteria and insects in the forests near Chernobyl has been inhibited by radiation, leading to a large accumulation of flammable and radioactive leaf litter, dead trees and branches and other forest debris.

According to a 2014 study published in Oecologia, decomposers – organisms such as microbes, fungi and some types of insects that drive the process of decay – have also suffered from the contamination. These creatures are responsible for an essential component of any ecosystem: recycling organic matter back into the soil.

“The gist of our results was that the radiation inhibited microbial decomposition of the leaf litter on the top layer of the soil”, said Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and lead author of the study.

A further 2006 study in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity reported the results of small controlled fires, stating that “an increase of several orders of magnitude of the airborne radionuclide concentration was observed in the territory near the fire area …

“The additional inhalation dose for firemen exposed in the affected area can reach the level of the additional external irradiation in the period of their mission. The plutonium nuclides constitute the dominating contribution to the inhalation dose.”

The dominance of plutonium in the smoke is especially worrying since it is hard to detect using normal radiation detection systems such as Geiger counters owing the very short range of the alpha radiation emitted by the main isotope found in used nuclear fuel, 239Pu.

239Pu is especially dangerous when inhaled and even small particles of the isotope embedded in lung tissue can cause cancer. But firemen and others using Geiger counters to assess their safety under exposure to the ash would be lulled into a false sense of security – only to suffer the consequences in years to come.

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind

Ecologist Dmitry Shevchenko from the Environmental Watch on North Caucasus says it is difficult to predict where exactly the contaminants will go:

 “We don’t have a real-time monitoring system for the Chernobyl area. We can hypothesize whether the radionuclides will go here or there, but there is no-one who can reliably predict the situation.”

Ukrainian emergency services say 182 people and 34 vehicles have been dispatched to fight the fire. A Mi-8 helicopter and three An-32 water dropping airplanes are also working at the scene. The efforts are being coordinated from a mobile emergency headquarters.

According to the head of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone management department, radiation levels in the area remain normal. “The area on fire is relatively clean,” Vasily Zolotoverkh told the newspaper kp.ua.

He said the fire started at lunchtime, when emergency workers had finished putting out an earlier blaze which started during the night. The emergency services have stated that it could have been caused by a lit cigarette.

Ukraine’s acting head of emergency services said earlier the forest fires were not a threat to the sarcophagus sealing off Chernobyl’s crippled Reactor 4.

Chernobyl and the surrounding area have been abandoned and remain off-limits following the April 1986 disaster, when an explosion and fire released massive amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Increased radiation levels were detected throughout Europe.

Chernobyl became the worst nuclear disaster in world history in terms of casualties and clean-up costs. Reactor 4, where the blast took place, was sealed off in a giant reinforced concrete sarcophagus to prevent further leaks.

This article is based on an article originally published on RT with additional reporting by The Ecologist.