PROPOSAL 5

Protect Farmland from Greenfield Solar  

Progressive year on year decline in our Utilised Agricultural Area (UAA) combined with a progressive year on year increase in the UK population will inevitably lead to a further reliance on imports and a higher exposure to levels of food security risk. In my opinion adding more greenfield solar into this already concerning situation cannot be viewed as common sense especially as other good options are available for solar deployment, those being rooftops and brownfield site locations.

Britain has less farmland in use than at any time since 1945 and the UAA fell by 2.2% or 948,864 acres in 2022 alone. Pressures of residential, industrial and recreational use from a rapidly rising population together with non-food producing incentive schemes in the UK Agricultural Transition Plan are taking their toll on productive capacity at a time of ever-increasing geopolitical instability. Add into this the government pledge under net zero obligations to see a five-fold increase in solar production from 14GigaWatt (GW) to 70GW by 2035 and we have a serious and undeniable threat to food security on our hands. Furthermore, large scale green developers are now pursuing applications under (NSIP) Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project rules which make local planning objections less likely to succeed.

Pro solar group carbonbrief.org state that the scale up of ground based solar to 70GW will only take up 0.3% of the total UK land area and 0.5% of farmland. However not only is this calculation based on a ‘future potential average due to innovation in panel design’ metric of 3 acres being required to produce one Mega Watt (MW) (whereas our current installations average 6) but it fails to take into account which agricultural land grades are being used. It is often claimed that greenfield solar is perfect for ‘marginal land’ (grade 3b and lower) and yet large amounts of BMV (best & most versatile) higher grade lands are used, furthermore grade 3b land is not ‘marginal land’, it is perfectly capable of growing food, it just cannot grow the full range of crops or potentially yield as much as higher grades. Frustratingly (or perhaps by design) DEFRA does not keep a record of which grades are used however I have overlaid the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero database map onto my land grade chart for Cornwall and I can see only 100MW deployed onto land of grade 3b or below, the rest is on 3a or 2 BMV and this is in a county with the highest percentage of ground based solar deployment at 28% of the national total (double the amount of the second highest area, the south east with 14%).

If we take the metric of 6 acres required to produce a MW then increasing capacity from the current 14GW to 70GW (54GW required) will require 324,000 acres. Add this to the existing 14GW and the total acreage is 408,000 acres or 165,115 hectares or 1,651 square kilometres. All 32 boroughs of the Greater London area cover 1,572 square kilometres so we are talking about an area of land close to that contained within the M25 motorway. This area as a percentage of total pasture and arable land is 1.19% and as a percentage of arable land alone it is 2.46%.

To calculate this in terms of lost food production capacity we can take the 8 tonne per hectare average yield of wheat and the 1800 loaves of bread produced from one tonne of wheat to give us a loss of 23,776,560 loaves of bread a year and with greenfield solar contracts usually offering 30 to 50 year terms that’s a lot of bread.

In the UK there is one full time farm job per 26.92 hectares along with an estimated 7 in associated support industries. Taking these figures we can calculate that 6,133 full time positions within farming will be lost and 42,934 will suffer the negative knock on consequences in their respective occupations.

Access to a green and pleasant countryside is without doubt of benefit to social wellbeing and there is a strong incentive within the current UK Agricultural Transition Plan to promote uptake of woodland and habitat creation schemes to maintain and increase such stewardship. However apart from the fact these schemes take even more land out of food production they seem to run contrary to the decidedly non-natural appearance of fields full of black solar panels surrounded by floodlight metal fencing. Beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder and a matter for subjective consideration, but I know where my preferences lie.

This of course brings us onto visual impact in relation to tourism, a topic most relevant to Cornwall. We have a county which after benefitting from millions of pounds worth of marketing now has an economy with an almost 30% GVA contribution from tourism and yet it has the highest allocation of greenfield solar in the UK. Rural holiday lets which are often part of farm diversification enterprises will be adversely affected by large scale greenfield solar development, it will not matter how comfortable the furnishings or how pleasant the hosts, in my opinion customers will not return if they are overlooking a valley full of black solar panels, they will look to book elsewhere next time.

Furthermore, agricultural land in Cornwall is of vital importance to self-sufficient food production due to its southerly latitude and influence from a temperate oceanic regional climate, this means it is ‘early land’, warmer, less susceptible to late frosts and in some cases capable of producing two crops a year. In terms of valuable food producing capacity it is considered premium stock and the long established production of cauliflower within the county is due to the fact that we can provide supply to the UK market before anyone else can especially during cold periods when Lincolnshire, central and northern areas are held back by frost. Incidentally cauliflower is a vegetable that we desperately need to produce more of to fill the gaps in our self-sufficient production, in 2022 we only produced 55% of required supply, down 9% from 2021, so to take agricultural land out of food production for greenfield solar anywhere in the country is in my opinion extremely bad policy however here in Cornwall it is absolute madness.

So, is there an alternative to green field solar and does it have the sufficient surface area available for the 70GW by 2035 target? The answer to that is a resounding yes. The UK has 250,000 hectares of south facing commercial roof space and 30 million residential homes. If we estimate that just 10% of residential roofs are aligned suitably for solar capture then taking the national average roof size of 75m2 that would give us 225,000 hectares, this combined with the south facing commercial would total 475,000 hectares, enough for 196GW.

Brownfield site usage is also another great deployment use case and, in some instances, could return multiple benefits such as renewable energy usage efficiency and other resource capture. Take the example of a car park with overhead canopy parking bays fitted with solar panels sheltering customers from the elements, these would not only offer an upgrade to the user experience but they could harvest rainwater, grow attractive climbing plants beneficial to pollenating insects and most importantly generate renewable energy right at a point where it is required by electric vehicle charging. Point of generation use avoids any grid transmission losses (@15%) and is therefore the most cost-efficient use and indeed the unique selling point of this type of power generation.

There are some issues with building grid infrastructure to develop brownfield and rooftop solar but funding from the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects framework could be diverted from greenfield solar applications to provide the connection upgrades in urban setting where they will be required in any event with a population growing at almost 750,000 people a year.

Given the overwhelming negative effect that greenfield solar has on our national food security, our farming industry and out rural economy and considering the ample quantity of rooftop and brownfield site locations suitable for deployment we cannot support any further use of farmland for solar energy production. We therefore propose:

i) An injunction be served on all green field solar farm applications currently in the planning pipeline pending an updated national food security risk review and a consultation regarding amendments to the national planning policy framework aimed at increasing protections for farmland.

ii) The national planning policy framework consultation must seek to place grade 3b land into the BMV classification and prohibit future solar farm development entirely in the entire BMV category.

iii) The national planning policy framework consultation must also seek to recommend enhanced protections against all development on all grades of farmland unless exceptional circumstances can be proven to apply. Extensions to the motorway network would be one such example where the cost to the nation from loss of farmland could be considered justified by the economic benefits gained from such nationally significant infrastructure project development.

iv) Amend current planning legislation to ensure any farmland currently occupied under solar farm contracts is returned back to food production post contract. No consecutive ‘planning creep’ development applications can gain merit from the original.

v) Amend policy framework around Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects funding to only support rooftop and brownfield site usage for solar energy production.

Notes

In the interests of attempting to present a factual case I have refrained from offering my personal opinions on wider current net zero energy policy within the UK, the following comments are of course relevant to our proposal above, but they should be considered separately so as not to prejudice any balanced debate on our specific policy proposals contained within proposal 5 above.

There is no climate crisis man-made or otherwise, the climate alarmist science has been politically influenced from the start and is fraudulent. Climate always changes and we would be far better off spending less to adapt than spending vast sums attempting to prevent, you’re better off working alongside nature rather than trying to oppose it as King Canute found out to his embarrassment in Southampton. The whole thing is a green gravy train and a globalist wealth transfer operation aimed at extending the great divide, a perfect political scam. Having nearly 40% of our energy portfolio coming from very expensive and very inefficient renewable production is economic madness, they have their place, but the energy policy is disastrously misguided and many of us are now waking up to the extent of our new energy, food security and productive manufacturing risk that has been caused by it and we know it is wrong.

Deploying solar on productive farmland and thereby increasing our food security risk is the art of creating another problem from one that doesn’t exist in the first place and that also is most definitely wrong.

Burdening Cornwall which has one of the most unique and iconic landscapes in the UK and some of the earliest frost free agricultural land in the country with 28% of the current greenfield solar generating capacity cannot be seen as common sense, especially by the local economy which is 30% dependent on tourism and by the agricultural industry it has displaced and by those of us among it who know it spells bad news for the future and who know that for this county it is undeniably wrong.

It’s wrong, wrong, wrong…………..and three wrongs don’t make a right.