Representation by Matthew Guy
- Date submitted
- 9 September 2024
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
This project is totally out of scale for the local community. Aldington and Mersham and Sellindge are small, separate, independent villages and this project will cover the majority of the green space between these villages, devastating the views especially as the panels will need to be high off the ground in order to compensate for the poor natural orientation of the ground. Screening is not an option due to the topology. It is within 300 m of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and will destroy areas of archaeological areas of interest. There have been some significant fires from storage batteries. These fires can only be contained not extinguished and the heat and fumes are life threatening. There has been no meaningful justification of the locations chosen or why the battery storage is so much larger than the planned generation. The majority of the battery sites that are within 300 m of houses and within 350m of a residential home. These short distances are known to pose hazards to life and should be significantly increased. The majority of the farmland, although not of the best quality, is by no means the worse and includes 38 acres of good quality. After BREXIT, food security is even more important. Kent and especially this area has historically been agricultural producing large amounts of both arable crops and meat (the lamb from this area rightly has an excellent reputation for quality) and we should be keeping and enhancing our ability to produce food for our nation. We enjoy a large number of footpaths in this area that are regularly used and this project affects at least 12 ancient rights of way. There will be significant noise from this proposed project which will impact on the health and ability of people to enjoy their homes. There is currently no technology to cancel the noise. There has been little or no genuine consultation with local residents. The plan after the consultation was not fundamentally different from the one put forward initially. As with other major national projects, the local community views are being ignored by people who will not have to live with the consequences and will only gain financially. We already live with the frequent disruption to the flow of traffic along the M20 and the lack of an internation station despite the blight of the Eurostar infrastructure and now it is proposed that we put up with the noise disturbance and destruction of our landscape for the foreseeable future. It is not acceptable in its current proposal.