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Solar farming

Solar farms seem to be catching on with farmers - stimulated by the Feed-In Tariff which offers a good income if you have the money to invest and space for large PV arrays. Madeleine Lewis of Farming Futures, a body backed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the NFU and Forum for the Future, the environmental group, told the Daily Telegraph (14/8/10): “A year ago, farmers thought of solar as not very profitable and that’s obviously changed. They are now very keen to invest in renewables. They are using a lot of energy, prices are going up and that has hit their businesses hard. Renewables projects insulate them against rising prices and provide a new income. There’s a lot of buzz around it.”

According to the Telegraph’s report, nearly 40 farmers in Cornwall ‘have already inquired about planning permission for solar projects in the county and more are likely to follow. Installations are also being planned in Herefordshire, Somerset and even the North East of England, despite there being 20% less sun than in England’s south-western foot.’

It noted that Michael Eavis, the high-profile farmer and host of the Glastonbury music festival, is installing a £550,000 project using 1,100 panels on the roof of his cow barn. It will be the biggest solar roof in the country. In Herefordshire, a group of eight farmers is clubbing together through advisory company 7Y Energy, owned by 450 farmers, to buy solar panels for their barn roofs. Another group of 35 are undergoing surveys to see if their sites are suitable.

The Telegraph noted that one of the most ambitious investors in solar energy in the UK is MO3 Power, which is already engaged with 15 farmers and wants to have 100 sites generating 500 MW of energy within five years. A typical site would it says cover 13–15 hectares, generating 5 MW with the potential to give an annual income of £50,000 a year for farmers leasing their land for the solar farm.

And as I noted in an earlier blog, Ecotricity also has plans for solar farms – 500 MW in the SW. And it has recently also submitted a proposal for a 1 MW ‘sun farm’ at Fen Farm, Conisholme, near Grimsby, on land next to a 20-turbine wind farm. It would consist of 59 rows of south-facing solar panels on a 4.7 acre site. It’s also applied for permission to install five more wind turbines and sees the project ‘one of the first combined wind and sun energy parks in the world’.

However the first to go ahead seem likely to be a 5,000 panel project developed by 35 Degrees, occupying 7.3 acres of Wheal Jane, a Cornish tin mine, abandoned in 1992. It’s expected to generate 1.34 million kWh each year. It has evidently just got approval from Cornwall Council planners. Cornwall Council has estimated that solar power developments could bring up to £1 bn in investment. Lucy Hunt, a manager at Cornwall Development, commented: ‘We’re seeing the start of a Cornwall solar gold rush as developers need to have built their farms, with full planning consent, by April 2012 to take full advantage of the Government scheme.’

35 Degrees says that it plans to install 100 MW of solar farms in due course.

Another project, Benbole farm in St Kew in Cornwall, is also well advanced. It has applied for planning permission for a 2 MW array in a seven-acre field. It’s being backed by Penzance-based renewables specialist Renewable Energy Cooperative (R-ECO), along with the commercial arm of the University of Exeter, in a consortium of local companies calling itself “Silicon Vineyards”, which has a wider £40 m programme aiming for 20 MW of capacity with 10 solar farms.

Impacts

The NFU evidently believes that as many as 100 farmers will be setting up major solar projects by next year with many more already planning small-scale developments. The NFU is encouraging farmers to mount PV panels on barn roofs or to use land around the edge of fields for solar panels rather than using fertile agricultural land for so-called ‘solar vineyards’. Dr Jonathan Scurlock, the NFU’s chief adviser on renewable energy, told the Telegraph that farmers could graze chickens, geese or even sheep underneath field-based panels to maintain agricultural use.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England, which has opposed the construction of many wind farms, said it would prefer that ‘car parks and factory roofs’ were considered first when siting these sorts of projects. However, R-ECO says that it is ‘very carefully selecting sites that will not impact the local environment, either visually or through impacting on natural ecosystems. As a co-operative business, we understand and respect the importance of maintaining natural beauty of our environment and we are working diligently to ensure that our farms visual impact will be mitigated through bush and tree plantation which in turn will act to offset the carbon footprint caused by our developments.’

Commenting on Benbole Energy Farm, R-ECO told the Guardian (18/5/10) that ‘the visual interference will be negligible. It’s very low to the ground and the surface of the panels are matt rather than reflective. No planning concerns have been raised by the local planning authority after initial inspections.’ It added ‘the array will be hidden from view behind willow coppice or by traditionally built Cornish hedge rows by our in-house Cornish Hedger’.

R-ECO says that around 10% of the income from the scheme will be set aside for a community fund, and they also keen to support local community-owned solar farms. It says it is ‘going to open up the doors to PV farms to everyone by developing solar farms paid for by communities and individuals. This will allow anyone and everyone to benefit from the financial rewards of solar PV even if they do not own their own home, do not have a south-facing garden, live in a flat/apartment and do not have the thousands of pounds to invest in their own system.’

It adds: ‘Our community solar farms will allow anyone to invest any sum of money and get the lucrative financial rewards for doing so as well as be satisfied that their investment has gone towards bettering the environment and improved fuel security.’

Posted by Dave Elliott on September 30, 2010 12:43 PM | Permalink