Two years ago, Chris and Jenna Humphrey moved from their urban house to their rural dream. “We wanted our kids to have this,” says Chris, gesturing at the green fields surrounding their cottage, which sits in splendid isolation in the south Norfolk countryside. “It was pitch black when we moved in and the first morning the kids woke up they looked out of the window and there were three deer walking across the field. It was magical for them.”They are settled now. Their older children, six and eight, go to the village school and Jenna, a special needs teacher, is nursing their youngest at home. “We fell in love with the house, because every window has such a lovely view. We thought the children would grow up here and never get bored. My little boy is constantly getting the binoculars out, birdwatching from the window.”Now there’s a blight on their wide horizons. On three sides of their home, the fields are set to be filled with solar panels for one of Britain’s growing number of huge solar farms – “solar factories”, say opponents. “I’m all for solar,” says Chris, a software developer. They have panels on their garage roof. “It just seems criminal that hundreds of new houses are being built down the road and none have solar panels, when they would benefit households. These solar farms seem like corporate thinking to generate profits – they are putting profits before the countryside, food production and the environment.”The solar farm proposed for these fields is one of dozens of 500MW projects – far bigger than most in Britain – under development. Britain’s solar contribution to the National Grid is still a modest 4.89% of electricity in 2023, compared with 12.05% in Germany (where just over a quarter of that 12% is provided by solar farms). The country needs a lot of new solar if Labour are to hit their ambitious target of decarbonising electricity supply by 2030.Solar is the cheapest and easiest renewable energy to build. Chinese-made panels now cost just 10 US cents per watt; you could build a fence with them more cheaply than with ordinary fencing materials, joke industry analysts. Solar farms are clean, usually disappear behind hedges and leave no lasting damage; their power is reliable and safe. It was the least offensive form of renewables. Until now.“The more you learn, the worse it gets,” says Chris of the solar developments on their doorstep. In Westminster, Labour is said to have a slogan: “Smash the Nimbys!” In the provinces, communities are discovering that the government’s 2030 target trumps old and trusted ways of doing things. Very few regulations govern solar farms. They can be put on the best grades of farmland. There are no minimum distances between the panels and people’s homes. And worst of all, say locals, the big new schemes, such as the one outside the Humphreys’ windows, qualify as nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs). This means solar applications bypa
Mer. Gen 1st, 2025
