Solar ‘industrialising our local countryside’

COUNTRYSIDE campaigners have expressed “anger and disappointment” at the Environment Agency’s decision not to require an environmental impact assessment, or even to comment on, West Berkshire Council’s plan for a largescale ‘solar farm’ and battery storage buildings at Bloomfield Hatch, Grazeley.

The Berkshire branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) believes that the agency is failing in its duty to protect the natural environment of West Berkshire by refusing to insist on a proper assessment of the solar farm’s impact on the area’s ecology and wildlife.

CPRE believes that the solar farm development represents “unnecessary industrialisation of our countryside” and that the council should be putting photovoltaic panels on rooftops instead of creating solar farms that sprawl across precious farmland.

The group wrote to the council last summer raising its “serious concerns” about West Berkshire’s policy on renewable energy, and citing

WBC’s scheme for a huge (45 hectares) solar farm at Bloomfield Hatch Farm, Grazeley, as “environmentally destructive” and “a missed opportunity to promote rooftop renewables”.

CPRE believes renewable energy can best be generated by installing solar panels on roofs, and leaving the countryside for agriculture and nature.

The charity has called on the council to “rethink its entire approach to renewable energy”.

“We cannot understand why the Environment Agency has not even commented on this appalling scheme for a vast solar farm at Bloomfield Hatch,” says CPRE Berkshire chairman Greg Wilkinson.

“Their unwillingness to challenge this scheme is extremely disappointing.

“So-called solar farms not only disfigure the landscape but there is growing evidence that ‘temporary’ solar farms can do lasting damage to the soil quality and biodiversity of the countryside around them, preventing the land from being used in future for grazing farm animals and harming the local wildlife too.”