Banning solar farms on agricultural land seems to be a contentious issue, but it is difficult to see why. Where is the sense in harming the environment to protect the environment? Why trade off food security for energy security? Agricultural land needs to be kept as agricultural land to help feed the nation from within the nation as much as possible. Similarly, non-agricultural natural spaces need to be protected to maintain our biodiversity. 

Does this mean we give up on the potential for large scale solar to contribute to energy security and driving down the cost of energy? Absolutely not. 

You can stick your solar panels where the sun doesn’t need to shine. 

What we need is a national focus on installing solar panels over large infertile areas, where it will have no environmental detriment. 

The most obvious option is to cover as many suitable large roofs as possible with solar panels. Many more could be done with the right incentives, and where the buildings are publicly owned, the government can simply choose to make that happen. Solar farms however are ground mounted arrays, far larger than most roofs, and the sensible place for these is over tarmac or concrete, not over vegetation. 

We need to see solar panels installed on frames over car parks on a massive scale. Not only does it give you generation from areas the size of solar farms, it also gives protection from the weather for users of the car parks and on-site generation for the charging of electric vehicles. 

This is not a new idea. Exeter City Council did it on the top of some of their multi-storey car parks back in 2016. See article from the time

It doesn’t need to be limited to multi-storey car parks, and indeed doing so would actually limit the area available. Councils should be covering most of their park-and ride car parks with a canopy of solar panels. Supermarkets and out of town shopping centres could be doing the same. There are massive areas where simply by raising the frame height, ground mounted solar on the scale of large solar farms is possible without any loss of biodiversity or agricultural land. 

Roll this out at scale and it will become very cost effective. Become slick at this and it is an exportable service. The UK can and should lead the way in brownfield solar. 

On a similar theme, places like large South facing concrete embankments are an obvious location for large scale arrays. We should also be developing simple and cost effective modular options for covered walkways. If you want to create a covered walkway, the go-to option should be a solar roof. 

So, let’s drive forward with large scale solar, but be more sensible about where we put it. 

Opinion piece by Ian Sturt, Chairman of Proficiency
29 October 2022