CARE - Campaign Against Rural Exploitation

Update on Low Carbon’s industrialisation of sustainably-irrigated farmland for conversion to solar. (Sound on if you can stand it 😳)

One of the great myths of farmland solar development is that land removed from food production for solar will be able to be de-industrialised and returned to agriculture in (typically) 40 years’ time.

In creating this ‘site’, the narrow local lanes have so far endured a fairly constant stream of huge aggregate trucks for over 5 months.

The two container lorries seen in the video have travelled about 600m across fields from the farmyard.

Does anybody have any idea how much aggregate it’s taken to get them there?

Does anybody believe there is any genuine intention to revert to farmland or is this just so far in the future that it won’t be a problem for those who lobbied for it?

This is one small field on a 100 acre site, but to give an idea of the scale of the issue, this one developer has over 1,500 acres of farmland applications at various stages of development in Essex alone.

Current UK total for greenfield sites under threat of solar development is over 92,000 acres. See https://www.uksolaralliance.org/ for more detail.

For fellow campaigns across the country wanting to demonstrate the reality of permitting rural solar to their LPAs, this noise has been fairly constant, 5.5 days a week for 5 months - so far.