Huge row as giant 2,000-acre solar farm to be built overlooking King Charles’s Highgrove | UK | News
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Huge row as giant 2,000-acre solar farm to be built overlooking King Charles’s Highgrove | UK | News
A huge row has broken out over plans to build a gigantic solar farm on land next to the King’s Highgrove estate. Lime Down Solar Park aims to have a generation capacity of 500 megawatts of clean energy to power approximately 115,000 homes in Wiltshire and just across the border in Gloucestershire.
The 2,000-acre solar farm is planned to be just a stone’s throw away from King Charles’s Highgrove estate.
But there is fury from those who oppose the plans who say that the “profit-making monstrosity” will be a blight on the landscape, reports The Times.
Planning documents reveal that the majority of the park would be constructed north of the M4 and south of Malmesbury in north Wiltshire as well as on part of the Duke of Beaufort’s 52,000-acre estate in Gloucestershire.
The Duke is on friendly terms with the King as Highgrove House is just nine miles away. Now, however, campaigners are fighting the solar farm and a group has launched an online petition to “prohibit ‘mega solar facilities’ over 50MW on UK farmland”.
Tracy Somerset, an actress turned environmentalist, is the Duke’s former wife and is also opposing the plans. She still lives on the estate in a separate house.
She said: “Solar panels should be on roofs, along motorways, or industrial sites. » She added: “Land should be for growing food, not profits for a few landowners, manufacturers and investors.
“Be careful what the climate change fearmongering will lull us into accepting.”
The Stop Lime Park action group said the “profit-making monstrosity” would ruin the landscape and curtail “productive agricultural land”.
The group said: “This is not an anti-solar campaign. We believe that large industrial solar farms should be located on former industrial sites or next to motorways, not on productive farmland. »
James Gray, the Conservative MP for North Wiltshire, opposes the plans.
On his website he said: “Of the ten largest solar parks in England, eight are in our beloved county…We have 42 operational solar farms with a further 12 under planning or construction, nearly all in the north of the county.
“They cover 3,000 acres, which is more than any other county in England…
“And now we have an absolutely outrageous application for vast new solar parks under the misleadingly rustic title ‘Lime Down Solar Park’.
“It will be 2,000 acres of vanity mirrors stretching from Luckington to Malmesbury, from Sherston to Hullavington, from the M4 to Corston.
“It will require dozens of hideous battery storage units, and miles and miles of road disruption to get the electricity to Melksham and thence into the grid.”
He added that it would be “an absolutely monstrous destruction of some of the most lovely landscapes in north Wiltshire”.
Island Green Power is behind the scheme that it says will generate low-cost, clean electricity as well as storing low-carbon power.
A spokesman for the Duke told the Times: “The estate’s decision is commercial and aligns with government guidance that the development of low-carbon infrastructure, such as solar farms, is a critical national priority. »
Express.co.uk has contacted Buckingham Palace and Island Green Power for comment.
Cet article est apparu en premier en ANGLAIS sur https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1884310/huge-row-giant-solar-farm-overlooking-King-Charles-s-Highgrove