Overwhelming scale

East Park Energy is on an excessive and literally overwhelming scale. Covering 1,900 acres of countryside, it’s 25 times bigger than the local Manor Farm solar site, and 34 times the size of the Grafham Water solar array. Dominating or surrounding several villages, this energy installation would be enormous. Vast tracts of farmland would vanish under glass in an industrial corridor nearly six miles long

Against current policy

The plan defies current planning guidance. Government policy states that large scale solar power facilities should be located on previously developed and non-agricultural land

Better places for solar

There is plenty of capacity on brownfield land, domestic and commercial rooftops and car parks for solar panels. CPRE, the countryside charity, estimates a technical potential of 117GW of solar power on 650km² of non-domestic and domestic rooftops and car parks in England alone

Solar already in the area

This new 400MW capacity proposal does not take into account existing or planned solar sites in the immediate area. We already have two local solar energy installations in operation, and two new schemes have now been approved, representing 155MW capacity in total. These smaller schemes combined with East Park Energy would create a solar corridor of 2,800 acres

40 years is not ‘temporary’

The so-called ‘temporary’ East Park installation would take up to three years to build. The developer has applied for a 40-year power production term. The owner of the Manor Farm solar site in our area has already extended the lifetime of its facility, not even 10 years into its agreed 25-year term

Environmental burden

No case has been made to show that the environmental benefits of this scheme outweigh its huge burden on the environment. The project will rack up enormous environmental impacts including millions of tonnes of concrete, all the metal, glass and other components for nearly 700,000 Chinese-manufactured panels, the multi-year construction and transport programme, the removal, recycling and replacement of obsolete and failing panels from the thousands originally installed, and finally decommissioning and disposal

Soil damage concerns

Photovoltaic panels and the significant infrastructure that goes with them risk damaging soil quality. The developer’s claims that the soil would be ‘rested’ over decades of panel coverage are inaccurate, according to Bedford Borough Council’s original scoping consultation response. Research shows that soil that’s compacted and kept in the shade with limited cultivation or augmentation can result in irreversible harm – if it were ever returned to productive agricultural use

Utility-scale solar sites attract crime

Criminal gangs are increasingly targeting large solar sites – cable thefts were on track to double in 2024. Figures from Opal, the national intelligence police unit specialising in serious organised acquisitive crime, show that by August 2024, there had already been more cable thefts than the total number in either 2022 or 2023. Thefts of both solar panels and cables together were on target to increase by 32% in 2024, compared to 2022. Criminals are attracted to solar energy installations because of the millions of pounds worth of equipment and the value of metals such as copper

Loss of high quality farmland

The scheme would take hundreds of acres of high quality agricultural land out of use for decades or for good – leaving fewer fields dedicated to British food production. Current national planning policy protects agricultural land classified as high quality. The majority of the farmland the developer wants to build the plant on – at least 74 per cent – is Grade 2 (‘very good quality’) or Grade 3a (‘good quality’). This fertile land can grow enough wheat to make more than 10 million loaves of bread a year

Battery bank safety risks…

East Park’s battery energy storage system, planned to be constructed in a compound between Hail Weston and Great Staughton, consists of around 100 shipping container-sized units, each one packed with racks of lithium-ion battery cells. These battery banks have well documented fire and explosion risks – there have been serious emergency incidents in the UK and internationally. Lithium-ion battery cells can go into ‘thermal runaway’ and it is virtually impossible to put out the resultant fires. Battery fires give off highly toxic fumes that can reach a radius of several kilometres. Millions of litres of water are needed to cool systems that have gone into thermal runaway and even this firewater becomes contaminated and has to be contained and disposed of before it reaches surrounding land or water courses. Risk assurance specialist DNV has said that every lithium-ion battery storage system will have at least one failure in its lifetime – it is a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’

…and battery bank issues

Even East Park’s industrial-scale 100MW lithium-ion battery system would not be able to store energy for long – data from the developer suggests that its battery array would hold just 30 minutes’ worth of electricity for the 108,000 homes it claims to be able to ‘power’. So every night and in the many times across the days and seasons when solar power plummets, a maximum of just half an hour of energy could be stored ready to export to the grid. And battery energy storage offers developers lucrative arbitrage opportunities for times of peak demand – developers like Brockwell Storage and Solar have already made it clear that profits from energy trading via battery storage assets are a significant part of their business model

Noise during construction…

Installing solar power infrastructure is a major, full-on construction operation. As well as all the usual noise to be expected from the traffic, people and plant in and around a series of busy construction sites spanning hundreds of acres, the repetitive sound of pile-driving would dominate local countryside – and the sound travels. It’s estimated that around 250,000 posts would have to be pile-driven to support nearly 700,000 photovoltaic panels

…and noise in operation

After the hundreds of workers have finally left our rural community, construction noise would be replaced by different challenges for local residents. Battery energy storage systems incorporate noisy fan-cooling systems and the solar power inverters needed to convert DC electricity generated by solar panels into AC electricity create an insistent low hum or whine that can impact residents from hundreds of metres away

Poor solar performance

The UK is ranked one of the worst in the world for solar power potential. Solar power comes last in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s set of renewable energy technologies, rated by productivity. There is a massive gap between what the tech is capable of – its ‘nameplate’ capacity – and what it actually achieves in the UK climate. The current five-year average efficiency is just over 10%. That means that for every 1MW of installed capacity, taking up around 5 acres of land, solar in the UK is producing on average around 0.1MW of power. The East Park plan, with a 400MW nameplate capacity, is likely to generate as little as 39.6MW on average, according to the latest data released by the government

Visual impact on landscape character

Imposing a power plant of this huge scale would have a detrimental visual impact on the open, attractive landscape. Picture close to 700,000 solar panels mounted 3 metres high across 1,900 acres of rolling countryside. Add security fencing, lighting, CCTV, inverters, 3.5 metre high transformer units, and all the infrastructure associated with industrial battery energy storage systems. Natural screening – so-called ‘green infrastructure’ – is not likely to be effective. Planting often fails (and has at existing local solar sites), and even if it’s successful, it takes years to mature. But it would not disguise the mass of glass and metal in any case – many of the fields earmarked to be filled with panels bank away from sightlines, and much of the development site features sloping terrain

Increased flood risks

Changing the use of cultivated farmland can change rain drainage patterns. The ‘gutter’ effect of solar panels and soil compaction can mean that solar sites on this excessive scale interrupt overland flow routes, reduce the rainfall absorbed into the ground and increase the rate and volume of surface water runoff. This could lead to larger volumes of water impacting downstream which could raise the risk of flooding along the Pertenhall Brook through East Park Site A and to the River Kym. Site C is also likely to create faster runoff into the Kym. Both these areas already flood after heavy rainfall   

Disruption and danger through a multi-year build

This so-called ‘temporary’ installation would take up to three years to build, with the sites operating long hours Mondays to Fridays and half days on Saturdays. All the local communities would feel the impacts from the huge volume of construction traffic on our narrow B and C roads – thousands of HGV movements and thousands of site worker journeys as hundreds of site operatives go to and from the 10 construction compounds and site zones – plus the noise, dust and mud across four sprawling super sites. East Park’s main construction compound would be off the busy B645, well known for its accident blackspots, and ‘rat run’ traffic is anticipated across the whole local rural road network. The community forced to live through the construction of the UK’s first solar ‘NSIP’, at Cleve Hill in Kent, describes the process as a “nightmare”