Families Face Losing Their Land in Solar Power Push

It seems that solar panel companies are being given the right to impose compulsory purchase on private landowners in the interests of pursuing Net Zero as quickly as possible. The Telegraph has the story:

When Sarah Pye and her partner Doug Knight bought a small property on Anglesey in Wales, it seemed to be the rural idyll they’d always wanted.

Quiet and picturesque, the smallholding was meant to be a place to raise their children and run a local tourism business. Or at least that was until a solar developer warned it could seize control of their land – casting doubt over their future plans and life savings.

“Out of the blue, we had a series of letters from LightsourceBP, a solar energy company, saying they may need our land for a solar farm,” says Sarah.

The letters, describing plans for the 3,200-acre Maen Hir solar fields, arrived just after she and Doug had finished four years of work – including planting 4,000 trees to create a woodland camper-van site.

“They want to run cables right through our new woodland and campsite and surround our property with solar panels,” says Sarah.

“And it seemed like we had no choice because if we refused, they would use compulsory acquisition powers.”

Across to the east, other landowners are being confronted by similar demands:

Over in Norfolk, two dozen villages are facing the same threats, but from a different developer.

Island Green Power’s East Pye Solar Project, a proposed 500 megawatt solar and battery energy storage system, would cover 2,500 acres of farmland – amounting to an area similar in size to the city of Chichester.

But, as in Anglesey, the developer initially owned little or none of the land. Instead, it plans to buy or lease what it can and acquire the rest using compulsory purchase.

“It seems like they can do what they want,” says Rebecca Mayhew, who co-runs Old Hall Farm with her husband Stuart, near Woodton, deep in the Norfolk countryside.

It seems that many overseas companies are involved, among them the Australian investment giant Macquarie:

But Macquarie is just one of the many, mostly foreign, solar developers being given rights to take land rights from UK citizens.

All want to build solar energy plants whose profits will come largely from subsidies paid for by levies on Britain’s energy bills.

The Planning Inspectorate for England – which only deals with the largest schemes – lists 40 vast solar plants approved or in planning, with its Welsh equivalent listing three more, including the Maen Hir development on Anglesey.

The legislation at the heart of this controversy is the Planning Act 2008, drawn up by the last Labour government when Gordon Brown was prime minister and Ed Miliband was completing his first stint as energy secretary.

Miliband helped steer the bill, which had a key aim of accelerating large-scale energy projects.

The first step was to classify these as nationally significant infrastructure projects, limiting the ability of local authorities to object to schemes and handing ultimate approval to the Secretary of State.

However, the killer clause for property owners was one that handed developers “compulsory acquisition” rights to take over other people’s private land and buildings.

The situation seems to be unprecedented in the last hundred years:

What is now happening is that, whenever a solar company seeks a development consent order, it almost always asks for those powers as part of the deal.

“This has set the stage for the most significant land transfers to private companies for more than a century,” says David Rogers, Professor of Ecology at Oxford University and founder of SolarQ, which monitors the expansion of solar farms.

“Solar and other renewable developers have been given outrageous powers by Miliband and they can use these powers to force people to give up their land, often top-quality farmland, to industrialise it with solar panels.

“So far, about 2,000sq km of English farmland are set to be covered in solar panels and many hundreds, possibly thousands, of people are facing legal threats of losing their lands and livelihoods.

“Most solar development companies are foreign-owned, so we risk seeing British people thrown off their land by foreign speculators all in the name of Net Zero.”

As Sarah Pye says:

We set up our home and business here to support our family and the local area. We have put years of work into our business, but who is going to come here just to see a countryside ruined by solar panels?

Worth reading in full.