SOLAR power is a growth industry, critical to the Government’s pursuit of net-zero emissions and mired in controversy. Britain’s largest solar farm, the 220-acre Shotwick Park in Flintshire, is about to be dwarfed by super schemes already in the pipeline. In Nottinghamshire, 6,920 acres of agricultural land have been earmarked for the Great North Road solar park, together with 3,700 acres for the neighbouring One Earth project and 13 smaller solar farms in an area compared to the Klondike Gold Rush.
Last month, protestors marched on West-minster to oppose Oxfordshire’s Botley West solar scheme on land owned by the Duke of Marlborough’s Blenheim estate (3,440 acres) and the Lime Down project in Wiltshire on the Duke of Beaufort’s land near Badminton (2,000 acres). The latter has been described as a ‘carbuncle’ by North Wiltshire MP James Gray, who complains that the county already hosts eight of the 10 largest solar parks in England.
It is true that installations with a capacity of at least 1MW (one megawatt) are concentrated in the South, where there is good connectivity to the National Grid. Even so, ‘Must try harder’ is on the report card for the Department of Energy & Climate Change if the Government is to reach its stated target of 70GW (gigawatts) of solar-power generation by 2035—five times the current output.
Government guidelines say solar farms should ideally be on brownfield sites (). Yet Prime
