The East Park Energy proposal

• The East Park Energy solar power complex proposal would cover 1,900 acres

• It would span six miles end to end, running from Swineshead in Bedfordshire to Hail Weston in Cambridgeshire

• Along with existing local solar sites and new consented solar site plans, East Park Energy would form a solar corridor of 2,800 acres

• Despite government planning guidance to avoid good farmland, Brockwell Storage and Solar is targeting prime agricultural land. The East Park scheme is sited on 74% ‘Best and Most Versatile’ land – some of the highest grade land in the country

• The farmland in the scheme is capable of growing enough wheat to make 10 million loaves a year

• East Park would include 696,000 solar panels, 2.3 metres tall by 1.3 metres wide. If laid end to end they would reach Rome

The construction process and construction traffic

• The developer plans to install nine construction compounds in addition to the main one in area D. Each compound is around 2.5 acres on land that is shown as solar panel areas. There are three in site A, five in site B and one in site C. These compounds will include offices, welfare facilities, parking, deliveries, materials, equipment and plant storage, waste facilities, fuel tanks, generators, water bowsers and lighting towers 
• The panels would be shipped from China (23,000 kilometres) where they are made using energy produced by burning coal. China has over 1,200 coal-powered power stations and is building more. When imported into Britain the panels don’t count towards our emissions target but the carbon is still being produced on our behalf in China 

• The site would take at least 30 months to build – but it’s estimated to be closer to three years. Cleve Hill in Kent, the only solar ‘NSIP’ scheme to be completed so far, is less than half the size and took over 18 months to be built by a Greek contractor. Its battery energy storage compound is still under construction

• Area B has twice the number of workers and twice the number of HGV and car movements as the other areas – but all using the narrow Great Staughton and Green End roads. According to the developer: “During the 30 month construction period the effects will be short term and temporary” 

• At peak over 850 construction workers would be travelling to and from the site. Workers would be commuting in from up to 50 kilometres away every day. There would be an average of about 600 workers on site for a large part of the construction phase

• It’s highly unlikely all transport, particularly commuting workers, would arrive by the suggested route from the A1 as they will be billeted radially from the site, meaning outlying villages would also be impacted by increased traffic

• Plans show HGVs would be using local roads to access different zones within the site. This would mean traffic controls for prolonged periods, perhaps years, on the B660 opposite the Manor Farm solar site entrance and on a longer stretch of the Great Staughton Road near New Pond Farm, and Green Lane

• The main site entrance would be on the B645 with construction and other traffic accessing it from the A1 junction. The B645 is known for its accident blackspots

• The majority of traffic would be articulated loads and eight wheel tippers, vans, and specialist loads alongside construction worker cars commuting in. The heaviest of these vehicles will be transporting 160-tonne transformers from Felixstowe. These vehicles comprise a 16-axle trailer pulled and pushed with two 42-tonne trucks called ‘ballast tractor’ units, one at each end. The combined weight is well over 300 tonnes. This type of transport will dictate a number of temporary road closures while the 56-metre long load passes, including the B645 near Hail Weston, and will also require all traffic to be removed from a bridge en route while it passes over, due to the enormous weight. This type of traffic is indicative of the scale of the East Park scheme

• The solar panels alone would take around 1,300 articulated loads to deliver. On top of this would be the structures to support them, cabling, inverters, transformers and other power infrastructure

• Brockwell Storage and Solar plans to build an internal road network within the site to link the zones. This would take tens of thousands of tonnes of aggregate to achieve, delivered by hundreds of HGV loads

• The wooden posts which would support the 40 miles of mesh fencing would need to be around every three metres – which means 200,000 posts would need setting

• Galvanised steel frame structures (‘table frames’) are required to support solar panels at the correct angle in all weathers. The frames would need to be bolted to ‘C’-shaped galvanised pilings which would be at least three metres long. They would be hammered into the ground with piling machines which would be very noisy. A conservative estimate is that 250,000 pilings would be needed

Solar power’s poor performance in the UK

• The World Bank ranks the UK 229 out of 230 globally for photovoltaic power potential 

• In the UK, solar power is currently running at an annual average of just 10.2% efficiency – meaning that over a yearly cycle it produces around 10% of its ‘nameplate’ capacity

• East Park has an impressive-sounding nameplate capacity of 400MW – but if it had been operating in 2024, it would have generated an average of just 39.6MW across the year

• An identical solar complex in Spain would produce double the PV output of East Park Energy 

Lithium-ion battery energy storage

• The lithium-ion battery energy storage compound – 96 container-sized cabinets plus infrastructure – would be sited in Zone D, between Hail Weston and Great Staughton. This compound would be constructed from concrete. The battery storage units are well known for fire and explosion risks. Highly toxic gases are released when these systems fail. There have been three fires this year in the UK. Grid-scale battery storage is not currently properly regulated in the UK 

• Experts say that every grid-scale lithium-ion battery facility will fail at least once in its lifetime – it’s a case of ‘when’, not ‘if’

Decommissioning – and what happens next

• The site decommissioning process would take an additional estimated two years

• All the panels would be scheduled to be removed and replaced with new after 20 years of the scheme’s 40-year life. In addition, the inverters and transformers would be removed and replaced after 20 years

• The 40 miles of chain link fencing surrounding the site and the rights of way would be removed and replaced after 20 years of the 40-year life of the power plant

• Over 50% of what would be removed from the site during decommissioning would be sent to landfill – much would be left in the ground and not removed 

• No-one yet knows what will happen to high quality farmland left under solar power infrastructure of this scale for 40-plus years, despite claims to the contrary. Even the current small-scale solar sites have not been around for enough time to test long term impacts

Living with a significant national infrastructure scheme

• There are no regulations to control how far grid-scale solar should be sited from homes, businesses or schools. Developers can install panels and other solar power infrastructure wherever they want, including surrounding homes, businesses and other properties

• Brockwell Storage and Solar claims that only nine properties would be unduly affected by their plan and within 100 metres of the site boundary. Two of these properties belong to landowners with financial interests in the plan. Two properties are surrounded

• The plans to site solar panels are usually mitigated by planting screening hedges with intermittent trees, but these take at least 10 years to mature – a quarter of the life of the installation. Screening routinely fails in any case – as we have seen at the local 74-acre Manor Farm solar site

• Many public rights of way would be out of use during construction, and once built, the rights of way would form a maze of chainlink-fenced tracks with solar panels often on both sides. Brockwell Storage and Solar proposes to place park benches around the site
• Once complete, the site would employ just a handful of people
• Inverters, which will be installed across all four of the solar sites, are known to create an insistent whine or hum that can be heard hundreds of metres away