Professor Michael Jefferson, former Deputy Secretary-General, World Energy Council, and contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Nobel Peace Prize: “Our annual average PV output per installation is around half that of southern European countries like Spain. The World Bank ranks the UK 229 out of 230 for solar power potential. This is due to features we can’t change – surrounded by seas and frequently beneath clouds, the varying intensity of solar irradiance during the seasons of the year, and latitude, determining our fewer daylight hours. Across the year, the resultant solar power is a grossly ineffective source of electricity generation for the UK. To place solar PV panels in grid-scale schemes on good agricultural land in a country that has to import about 40% of its food defies logic.”

The 700,000 panels in the East Park Energy power plant plan give it a 400MW capacity. This sounds impressive until we look at the likely projected output in the UK climate. The latest annual data released by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero shows that if the East Park facility had been operating in 2024, it would have generated an average of just 39.6MW across the year. It would have produced the most power when it’s not needed: summer. In 2025 NESO warned that it may have to order solar facility switch-offs during the summer, as demand was not forecast to match supply.

There are countless reasons why our community is standing up to the East Park Energy solar super scheme. It’s on an excessive scale, it would take out high grade farmland, it would industrialise our countryside, it would attract criminals to the area – the list goes on. But, like all the other ground-mounted solar developments targeting UK farmland, the simple fact is that it would not be capable of producing anything like the energy its capacity suggests, and it is not worth sacrificing productive agricultural land to build it on. The numbers just don’t add up. Because of solar power’s poor performance in this country, solar panels should only go on brownfield land or built environment-based installations like rooftops, car parks and transport corridors.

An off-the-record comment from a new build energy exec sums it up: “The reason why the UK is using fields not roofs is [because] our solar yield is too low to make it financially viable on rooftops, relative to fields.”

The only way developers behind proposals like East Park can make solar pay in the UK climate is by massively over-scaling their plans – flooding fields with millions of panels to make up for the poor yields. And they are able to do this because they are importing cheap solar panels in huge volumes. Brockwell, the East Park developer, has already admitted its panels would be ‘Made in China’, and showed local residents a technical datasheet from Canadian Solar, widely understood to have issues in its supply chain via associations with forced labour in China.

East Park is one of more than 60 solar NSIP-sized proposals targeting farmland around villages in certain regions of the UK. With the smaller schemes already operating, these colossal new solar sites would mean more than 163,000 acres of farmland replaced with poor performing power production (and more in the pipeline). This would massively increase solar capacity in the UK – but would not deliver anything like the electricity to match. In fact, a new report by a leading renewable energy academic reveals that even if the UK meets its enormous 75GW solar capacity target by 2035, grid-scale solar would supply as little as 13% of annual national electricity demand. It would only reach about 16% if ‘best case’ battery storage was installed.