Councillors switched on to idea of £1m solar farm off Watery Lane

COUNCILLORS have pushed forward with plans to build a million pound solar farm on the edge of Ashbourne.

At a Derbyshire Dales District Council meeting, plans to build the authority’s first solar farm, off Watery Lane, were given a warm response.

The plans are in their early stages but the proposed site – between a cemetery, allotments, a tip and a sewage treatment plant – has been assessed as viable for a one megawatt scheme.

This would cost the council more than £1 million to build, but the authority, through expert consultants APSE Energy, say the scheme could pay for itself in 10 years and generate a profit of £3.5 million over 30 years.

It would achieve this by selling the electricity directly to Severn Trent, which runs the neighbouring sewage treatment plant.

At the meeting, Cllr Neil Buttle said: “I absolutely welcome it. It has been three years since I have been here and I’ve been looking forward to this every day, it is absolutely fantastic and I am really glad we are doing it.”

Cllr Peter Slack said: “It is a wonderful thing that we are going this way, we have got a lot, lot more to do and this is only the start. We are going in the right direction and we need to get more of these.

“I’d like to see more in-land wind farms really, they produce more energy than solar panels overall, but they are more controversial I must admit.

“But in the right place they are very OK. It never offends me looking at the ones near Carsington, I think that’s clean power, that’s not damaging the atmosphere.

“We have got to have clean power or we will have more of this. It is either have pylons or wind turbines you can look at, or have a world where we have more of what we had last week with all that heat and burning, it is terrible.

“We have really got to concentrate on going forward with more renewable energy.”

Cllr Peter O’brien said he “wholeheartedly” supported the proposal and said a second site in Stoney Middleton ought to be considered too, but it had been shot down due to the cost of connecting the rural site to the National Grid – said to be in excess of £2 millon.

Councillors agreed a plan to write to Ofgem to lobby for reduced costs in connecting small solar farm sites to the National Grid. Sites not connected to the grid could be left as “stranded assets”, said Tim Braund, the council’s director of regulatory services.

He said five council-owned sites were deemed to have initial potential as solar farms but only one, the Watery Lane plot, had been found to be viable after consultation works costing £14,600.

Mr Braund said the scheme would be used to offset the council’s carbon footprint. Council reports detail that solar panels could be installed on the site – pending a planning application and subsequent approval – by the end of 2024.

A 20-year loan from the Public Works Loans Board would be used to pay for the scheme, which would in turn be paid back with an interest rate of 3.63 per cent (which may change due to market conditions).

Councillors approved an additional £40,000 for consultancy work to investigate outstanding issues with the proposed Ashbourne scheme, including a grid connection and the formation of a planning application.

An agreement with Severn Trent, which already has its own small solar farm at the Ashbourne treatment works, would also need to be fleshed out and secured.

We have got to have clean power or we will have more...of what we had with all the heat and burning. Cllr Peter Slack