Representation by Emma Ellis
- Date submitted
- 15 February 2023
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
Mallard pass solar farm should worry everyone, wherever they live. The 2,105 acre site equivalent to 1,300 football pitches and 10 times larger than the largest solar farm currently in the UK. Almost 4.2 miles from one end to the other, with a perimeter stretching over 25 miles in entirety. I accept that solar energy has a part to play in supplying renewable energy, where appropriate however, Mallard Pass is an industrial scale solar plant inappropriately designed and disproportionate in response to the need for renewable energy. It affects at least 10 villages within a 3 mile radius, as well as being under 1 mile from Stamford named in the Sunday Times as ‘Britain’s top place to live’ in 2013 & 2021, and proclaimed by Sir Walter Scott as “the finest stone town in England”, a conservation area with over 600 listed Georgian buildings, including five medieval churches.. Food security is a problem in an overcrowded country, as is the lack of open non-industrial space: sacrificing both these things for the sake of ticking a box on some official green audit is first-rate folly. I believe this is a misuse of the NSIP regime. Fast-track central planning is all very well for government-initiated projects such as major roads or railways, or large single installations concerned with things like water or energy. It is far more questionable to use it when private companies are seeking to implement widespread land-use change over large areas of countryside which they happen to fancy. The Solar industry is currently focusing on land that delivers maximum financial returns, not environmental returns. Nobody is making any more farmland. There is plenty of poor land available in this country where solar can be placed, land where our food and crops cannot be grown, brownfield sites or, better still, commercial and residential rooftops. Mallard Pass in a totally inappropriate use of solar to quote Thérèse Coffey the current Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs “It’s really important we make the best use of our land to have that food security … It’s also really important when considering land use to consider the best place to put renewable energy, which by and large most people would agree, let’s use our best agricultural land for farming and make use of brownfield sites for a lot of these energy projects, too.”