Plans have been approved for a 60-hectare solar farm in Buckinghamshire.
The Low Carbon UK Solar Investment Company’s proposal to set up Callie’s Solar Farm at Owlswick Road, Ford were approved by Buckinghamshire Council’s central area planning committee at its September 25 meeting.
The application was a revised submission of a scheme already approved. The council had given consent for a 90-hectare solar farm in November 2022 but opponents brought a Judicial Review, quashing that decision.
The Judicial Review found the council had failed to give ‘great weight to the identified heritage harm and that the officer’s report had misled members by failing to give the identified heritage harm any weight in the overall planning balance’.
The new, reduced-sized application will feature 72,000 panels, a security fence, a substation, inverters, transformers, CCTV cameras mounted on poles and other equipment.
Sheep will be able to graze between the panels.
But Cllr Jim White of the Dinton with Ford and Upton Parish Council, who has long been fighting the plan, told the meeting he wondered if people realised the scale of the solar farm.
He said: “This is 115 acres of productive farmland, roughly the size of the Cowley motor plant and bigger than Ravens Lane and Gate House industrial zones put together.
“This is huge – potentially enough lost wheat production, should they grow wheat on it, to make one million loaves of bread.”
He suggested panels could, instead, be placed alongside the HS2 railway lines.
The solar farm is for a ‘temporary’ period of 40 years, after which the site is to be returned to agricultural use, but Cllr White was unimpressed.
He said: “Unless you get a bond from the developer, you have no guarantee that will be done.
“You and I will probably be gone in 40 years – I certainly will – but not our children. We run the risk of leaving them, not with a solar farm, but a solar wasteland in 40 years time.”
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