The Issue: Are the benefits of solar panel farms worth their impact on the landscape?

Cllr Craig Simmons, Leader of Oxford City Council Green Group

To minimise climate change and ensure our future energy security, there is no doubt that we need more cleaner, greener electricity and solar panels provide an increasingly affordable means of providing that energy.

Installing solar panels is also quick and scalable.

Everything from pocket calculators to large communities can be powered by the sun. Even large installations can be completed in a matter of weeks – rather than the years it takes to build a conventional power station.

Generating electricity from solar panels is also a safe and self-contained means of production. What other power source would you be happy to install on your roof or in your garden?

Prices for solar panels are plummeting as production ramps up and we have reached the tipping point where large, commercial installations no longer need to rely on subsidies to make them financially attractive.

Of course, some argue that large solar farms, such as Westmill on the Oxfordshire/Wiltshire border, destroy good farmland.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Most solar farms are either built on brownfield land – Westmill is on an old airfield – or are still used for rearing livestock.

Many farms allow sheep to graze amongst and under the panels and there is evidence to show that the shelter they provide actually improves production. In addition, biodiversity thrives in solar farms helping to, for example, maintain bee numbers.

Some people also dislike the appearance of solar farms.

Yet, unlike conventional power stations (think Didcot cooling towers), solar farms are rarely visible from any distance unless viewed from the air. Most solar panel arrays are no more than 1.5 metres high – they are easily hidden behind a hedge.

We should be excited and proud that Westmill is the largest community-owned solar farm in the UK, and possibly the world.

Of course, solar farms alone will never be able to produce enough electricity to meet our current demand. But they are already starting to make a valuable contribution.

NO

Michael Tyce, of the Campaign to Protect Rural England Oxfordshire Branch

Solar farms are a blight on the countryside, a waste of valuable space that should be used to grow crops, and cannot be justified.

A Government Planning Inspector described one application for a solar farm as “regimented rows of hard surfaced panels that would represent utilitarian elements on an industrial scale in open countryside” adding that the harm that would result would “significantly and demonstrably outweigh any benefits”.

Such catastrophic damage to our green fields should only be contemplated if it was necessary to serve some vital national interest.

It is not.

As the last government energy minister put it, many multiples of all the solar power we could handle could be generated by putting solar panels on just five per cent of existing domestic roofs, or 16 per cent of industrial ones.

There is no conceivable need to use green fields at all.

There is a limit to the amount of solar power we could use because it is effectively produced only during daytime in summer, when the demand for electricity is least, and it cannot be stored.

It therefore needs backup from (usually fossil) fuels to cover all the rest of the time, and enable us to watch television and fill hot water bottles, as well as run trains, light shops and power workplaces.

Solar farms also harm food security. As the present environment minister said: “I am committed to food production in this country and it makes my heart sink to see row upon row of solar panels where once there was a field of wheat or grassland for livestock to graze.”

Twenty years ago the UK produced 87 per cent of its own food, a figure now down to 68 per cent, with fruit and vegetables falling the most.

Food self-sufficiency is a vital national interest and we cannot afford to waste valuable land under unnecessary solar panels, which reduce its crop-growing capacity to little more than nothing.

After all, their whole purpose is to intercept the very sunlight which is the agent of plant growth.

Solar farms are a blight on the countryside, harm self-sufficiency in food, and are unnecessary.