An amendment to the energy bill tabled by Alicia Kearns, Conservative MP for Rutland and Melton, wasn’t moved when the bill began its third reading in the House of Commons yesterday so wasn’t voted on. The amendment would have provided a ‘wider block’ on the development of large-scale solar farms on high-quality agricultural land, according to The Guardian. An industry lobby group, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, claims it could have cost UK households around £5bn a year, or £180 per household.
During the debate, Kearns told MPs an application in her own constituency would see one village 95% encircled by a solar farm that would be 13 feet (4m) high. David Davis, MP for Haltemprice and Howden, said projects in his East Yorkshire constituency are taking up over 3,500 acres and destroying the lives of five villages. Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) said panels were going on to “land that should be growing food to produce the food security that this country needs”. Food security and energy security combined means national resilience, he added.
Supported by 24 other MPs, the amendment (No 48, page 38) was actually far more modest and simply called for the energy secretary to “prevent the development of solar energy projects on sites of over 500 acres where over 20% of the land is Best and Most Versatile agricultural land”.
Best and most versatile land
Best and most versatile (BMV) land is agricultural land in the highest three grades (1, 2 and 3a) ranging from excellent to good. The lower three grades (3b, 4 and 5) are regarded as moderate, poor or very poor quality. Natural England say 41% of the farmland in England and Wales is BMV land.
If approved, the amendment would have stopped very-large-scale solar arrays – those over about 75MW – on agricultural land which contained more than 20% BMV quality soil. It would not have prevented smaller developments (<500 acres) on wholly BMV land or very-large-scale development on the 59% of England and Wales’ agricultural land which is in the moderate to very poor quality category.
What it would have done is prevented developers ignoring existing planning guidance and would have more clearly defined what is and isn’t acceptable.
Current guidance
The British Energy Security Strategy which was last updated on 7 April 2022, has this to say about the location of large-scale solar farms:
“For ground-mounted solar, we will consult on amending planning rules to strengthen policy in favour of development on non-protected land, while ensuring communities continue to have a say and environmental protections remain in place.
“We will continue supporting the effective use of land by encouraging large scale projects to locate on previously developed, or lower value land, where possible, and ensure projects are designed to avoid, mitigate, and where necessary, compensate for the impacts of using greenfield sites.” [added emphasis].
In a written ministerial statement Eric Pickles, the then communities secretary, said in 2015 :
“We are encouraged by the impact the guidance [on the UK’s solar photovoltaic strategy] is having but do appreciate the continuing concerns, not least those raised in this House, about the unjustified use of high quality agricultural land. In light of these concerns we want it to be clear that any proposal for a solar farm involving the best and most versatile agricultural land would need to be justified by the most compelling evidence.” [added emphasis]
Page 82 of the draft NPPS for Renewable Energy Infrastructure (EN-3) published in 2021, says:
“Where possible, ground mounted Solar PV projects should utilise previously developed land, brownfield land, contaminated land, industrial land, or agricultural land preferably of classification 3b, 4, and 5 (avoiding the use of “Best and Most Versatile” cropland where possible). However, land type should not be a predominating factor in determining the suitability of the site location.” [added emphasis].
Despite this guidance, developers routinely submit applications for solar arrays on BMV land, with one particularly egregious example being the Helios project near Selby covering a 250MW farm of over 750 hectares (almost 1,900 acres), of which over 94% is BMV land.
A recent report by the CPRE (Campaign to Protect Rural England) shows between 2010 and 2022 the amount of high-grade BMV land lost to housing and industry rose from 60 hectares per year to 6,000 – a 900% increase. And this is before most of the large-scale solar farm applications were even submitted.
The problem is not just the lack of suitable lower grade land
A peer reviewed academic paper from 2019 by The Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST) at Loughborough University on the future scope of large-scale solar in the UK looked at site selection and suitability.
First of all, the paper found most (97%) existing large-scale solar plants globally were found to receive more than 210 Wh/m2 (0.21 kWh/m2 ) average hourly global horizontal solar irradiation. If this is taken as a minimum requirement for UK sites, it would cover all the land in the UK south of a line running from roughly the Humber Estuary to Snowdon in North Wales; about half of England or one third of the British mainland. Other constraints mean wooded areas, mountainous regions, hills or land with excessive slopes are unsuitable.
The researchers concluded that while the emphasis on avoiding high grade BMV agricultural land was “impactful” what was even more significant was the lack of 33 kV grid connections (called bulk supply points or BSPs) for large-scale arrays, those of around 50MW and above. Out of 2,782 BSPs located south of the 210 Wh/m2 irradiation line, only about a third were actually available for distributed generation connection due to various technical limitations including the use of old, legacy switchgear or the lack of ‘reverse flow’ capacity.
Most solar energy developers, for commercial reasons, also want to have installations within a few km – perhaps 5 km at most – of a suitable grid connection, which seriously limits potential sites and results in clusters or extremely large installations, predominantly in southern England.
It is this lack of capacity in the grid that is forcing developers to apply for solar farms on land within a 5,000m radius of a grid connections, some of which will be BMV quality.
No overarching strategy
What is also apparent is the absence of any overarching strategy in what has become a fragmented private industry, between government departments, the 11 distribution network operators, dozens of developers, many of whom are venture capitalists, and the planning authorities both national and local.
The government set a target of reaching 70GW of solar energy installed by 2035, set some basic guide lines and then tossed the problem out to the private sector to achieve it, in a totally uncoordinated fashion and without considering other factors, including food security which may itself become a problem down the line.
We could fall short of the target. Or the prospect of earning between £800 and £1,000 per acre every year for doing very little work will prove so attractive to farmers and landowners that the target will be massively oversubscribed. In which case, we could have a surplus of energy while being forced to import more and more of our food to make up for the lack of home grown produce.
What we need, as Sir John Hayes pointed out yesterday, is food security and energy security combined. But we may not get it.
