The biggest solar farm in the UK, capable of powering 14,000 homes, has been connected to the national grid in Oxfordshire.
The 46MW Landmead solar farm, in East Hanney near Abingdon, is built on low-grade farmland used for grazing sheep, which will remain along with new wildflowers to be planted as part of efforts to improve the site’s biodiversity.
In October, Liz Truss, the environment secretary, attacked solar power projects built on farmland, saying they were hitting food production and announced that farmers would lose agricultural subsidies if they allowed solar panels on farmland.
Truss’s intervention comes after a decision earlier in the year by the Department of Energy and Climate Change to bring forward the end of the current subsidy regime for large solar farms, with ministers saying they wanted to see more solar on building’s rooftops and less mounted on the ground.
The company has 10 solar farms in the UK, which it says are enough to power 40,000 homes a year, with another 10 in progress, though not on the scale of Landmead which is about 5MW larger than the UK’s previous biggest solar farm. About 200 people were employed during the project’s construction phase.
The new farm is built on grade three agricultural land – the middle ranking out of the 1-5 scale for quality of soil – which the company says has a history of not draining well and therefore not good for growing crops.
— source theguardian.com