Representation by Neal Entwistle
- Date submitted
- 31 January 2022
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
With regards to this submission the scheme is simply too overwhelming in the rural countryside in which it is planned. The shear scale of it will convert a beautiful rural agricultural area into an industrial monolithic landscape with dangerous battery storage modules dominating the skyline. The proposed landscaping will not hide these or the panels for at least 20 years as it will take that long to grow high and dense enough to give effective screening. The local area already has considerable amounts of solar PV and these distributed smaller schemes are an acceptable approach but we already have enough of these in West Suffolk. There is little evidence that these schemes provide any benefit to the areas in which they are located and the same applies to the Sunnica scheme, apart possibly from a few maintenance jobs. So the imposition of such a huge scheme comes with an entirely negative impact on the local population and zero benefits. Indeed the shear scale of construction traffic on small C class roads will undoubtedly cause incidents and higher risk in travel for all. Not to mention the fact that these roads will be greatly damaged by the proposed 310 HGV movements every day during the 2 years of construction. Financially, Sunnica is just a shell, a body set up to implement and has no trading integrity. The submission fails entirely in any guarantee of decommissioning funding should this scheme proceed. The operating company could simply drain all resources out of itself as it nears end of life and then enter bankruptcy leaving the taxpayer an expensive mess to clear up. The only way this should be structured would be for an Escrow account to be set up on day 1 and funded at a rate that would achieve 150% of the decommissioning costs within the operational time frame of the scheme. 150% would allow for a contingency and any surplus could be released when all was returned to farm land once again. Use of land is in heavy demand for houses and other uses too, not to mention food production. The recent pandemic should have adequately demonstrated that our reliance on imported food needs to be considered much more carefully. The land taken by this scheme is all productive agricultural land and with a continuing expansion of the population we need every acre to remain in production. There are far poorer and non productive areas that can accommodate PV schemes and the government should legislate to make these mandatory on all new and refurbished industrial buildings and probably on new houses too. This would easily eclipse the power generation of these damaging schemes with near zero impact. Green levies imposed on all of us are one of the reasons that our electricity prices are high enough to make these solar schemes viable but large scale solar is a flawed approach to national grid support. The obvious fact that they produce the least amount of energy in winter months when demand is highest and the most in summer when demand is lowest is an unbalanced approach. It is much better to aim for wind farms that do not require large amounts of land and produce a reliable average source of power. As the government White paper identifies, small scale nuclear is by far the best way to achieve sustainable energy generation and it takes up very little land, typically around 0.5ha. It is proven, reliable and the UK has serious skill in manufacturing and running these safely. One of two of these could more than replace this scheme with almost zero impact on the local area. And of course they provide an on demand source of power supply when you need it. If this went ahead in the scale proposed it would set a precident for further schemes entirely blighting many areas of the beautiful UK. It damages our environment with dangerous battery storage and takes valuable food producting land. It is possible to live without electricity but not without food. Consultation during the pandemic has been woeful and many people could not adequately make their voices heard. The maps published are poor and inadequate for many to understand the scale and impact of the scheme would have. It is sited in an area of countryside that is used for food production and has zero benefit to the local community. It is proposed by a faceless company that has zero links to the area and none of their executives live anywhere near it. I therefore wish this scheme to be refused.