The Several Other Solar Giants

Solar “farms” have featured in several articles on Cliscep, including John’s “Birdaggedon 3” and my own “Solar Giant Parks on Kent’s Lawn.”

Solar Giant talks about the project that began life as “Cleve Hill” and became “Project Fortress,” presumably as the irate locals started to grab their pitchforks. It was a nominal 350 MW with a footprint of 360 ha. They are expecting it to be sunny in Kent, because the typical ratio of land to power for solar farms is 2 ha : 1 MW. (According to Biofuelwatch via the NFU, and based on inspection of some planned schemes).

As I may have mentioned at some point, solar developers treat 50 MW (= c. 100 ha = 250 acres) as an important threshold. Once your project reaches 50 MW, it becomes nationally significant, and you have to go through more onerous planning procedures. Below that level (they love 49.9 MW for some reason…) you might get lucky and get the go-ahead from the local planning authority.

I decided to see how many Cleve Hills / Project Fortresses were in train, and so visited the Planning Inspectorate website to find out.

You can usefully apply filters, etc.

In so doing, I found 34 solar schemes in the works that exceed 50 MW (actually, the smallest is 100 MW). I was rather surprised to see that Cleve Hill is rather more than a troll than a giant: it ranks only 22^nd in power. The biggest is the 840 MW Botley West Solar Farm. On our rule of thumb, this will cover 1680 ha, or if you prefer that metric, about 2,400 football pitches. It might do a bit better than that, because of the 34, it’s one of the most southerly.

This map shows the locations of the 34, and the circles are in proportion to each scheme’s size (not to scale). Together the 34 would have a nominal power of 14.7 GW (nothing at night). And there are a lot of 49.9 MW schemes to add to that. (The one Mark noted as rejected on the Birdaggedon 3 thread, Radlett Green, was 49.9 MW. It was rejected by the local planning authority in 2021 and the developer appealed to the Planning Inspectorate. It’s a rational move for a developer to have a punt at an appeal, given the amount of dosh that they have sunk into the proposal.)

Three of the schemes have been consented: Cleve Hill (2020); Little Crow (2022); and Longfield (2023). Decisions for three others are pending, and the rest are at various stages, many yet to submit planning proposals.

I provide this overview for interest. If I find the time, I will look at some of the sites in more detail. I am particularly interested of course in how they deal with matters ecological. My guess is that I will find much to disagree with in their Environmental Statements.

As far as I know, all the proposed developments have their own websites. For some reason, the developers’ preferred metric is how many houses their panels can power. It’s sometimes rather hard to find out how much land their scheme is going to cover. That though, you may be unsurprised to learn, is the preferred metric of the organised opposition groups, of which there are at least a few (I haven’t looked in detail yet).

Personally, I think solar PV at our latitude, with our weather, is a crazy plan. One in which the metric is not electrons flowing out of the farm, but greenbacks flowing into it’s owners’ pockets. But then, I’m an old cynic.