Solar Arrays

Neil Parish Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) for initiating this debate.

I think that we can all agree that solar power is a real option for producing energy in the very near future, not only to meet our renewable energy needs and targets, but to keep the lights on. Solar arrays are swiftly installed and can balance the supply from more intermittent sources of generation, such as wind.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

I was intrigued by the hon. Lady’s comments earlier, when she said that she would prefer to have solar panels than Hinkley Point, which will fulfil 8% of the country’s total energy needs. We would have to plaster the whole of the south-west and probably most of the farm land of the south-east to get anywhere near that amount of power. I am absolutely intrigued if that is actually Liberal Democrat policy.

[Tessa Munt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but of course my comment was on the beauty or otherwise of Hinkley Point, as the hon. Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray) discussed. My point was that I do not believe that Hinkley Point is in any way beautiful, nor could it be considered attractive from any point of view. I accept that it produces power, and I certainly was not speaking for my party. I accept that there has to be a mix and that I cannot possibly stop Hinkley Point on my own, much as I possibly would like to do so. It is a valuable part of the mix, but I do not think that it is a very attractive blot on our landscape.

I am a keen environmentalist, and I believe that we have to make huge strides on energy saving, as well as on renewable energy generation, to ensure that we meet the targets that we set ourselves in the Climate Change Act 2008.

Using solar PV on domestic roofs is not the whole answer, and there are compromises to be made between orientation and the difficulty sometimes fitting in with architectural constraints. None the less, there is an opportunity to use commercial roofs for solar PV, too. I cite the cow shed roof of Michael Eavis, the founder of Glastonbury festival, who hosted 200,000 people the weekend before last at a highly successful and very sunny festival. I understand that he is the biggest private solar power and electricity provider in the UK. He has 1,116 panels on his cow shed roof at Worthy farm, and he produces 200 kW of power and saves 100 tonnes of carbon per annum. He uses that power to charge the generators used for long periods during the festival.

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[Tessa Munt]

As I understand it—I hope to become a member of the co-operative—the threshold is £250, a moderate investment for those of us who might be able to afford it. I cannot remember what the maximum investment is, but I think that it might be something like £10,000 or £20,000, which is certainly out of my aim. For those who commit to the scheme, the co-op will use the profits created by the feed-in tariff to assist those who are identified as fuel-poor within the community. It might look at houses that are particularly hard to heat; there are a number of properties with very thick stone walls where people have particularly high bills.

For my part, I have been working with a charity organisation examining the amount of money spent in the community of Wedmore on electricity bills, gas bills and domestic heating fuel. They can see exactly how much is spent within a parish. Then the co-operative will move to reduce bills in the properties that are most expensive to heat for those who have the least funds to do so. I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I hope that that answers some of her questions.

To return to the details of the scheme, sheep will graze in the solar paddocks, as they have been called. The energy will not be intensively farmed; there will be space, and sheep will be able to graze. At the end of the 27 years, the panels will be removed and the land returned to its original use. I understand that the investors can expect a pretty healthy 7.2% average rate of return on their investment.

I hope that the Minister will consider speaking to his counterparts in the Department for Communities and Local Government, because there is an opportunity to take localism to the next degree by ensuring that communities start to aim for self-sufficiency in their energy needs. Communities should be able to consider their energy needs and how they might help reduce them by ensuring that buildings are built in a more energy-efficient way and by using all sorts of investment to ensure that people have lower bills.

It would be a good solution if communities could consider how they will take responsibility for the power that they use. My sense is that there has been enormous resistance to wind turbines in two or three parts of my constituency. The answer that I would always like to give to people is that they should be able to approach their district council and say, “Look, if you don’t want wind turbines, what are you going to offer instead?” We have to deal with the question of energy and energy production. We cannot just throw our hands in the air and say, “We don’t want that, that or that,” while carrying on using energy at the same intensity as before. [Interruption.] Is the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) making a formal intervention?

[Neil Parish]

Get some nuclear power stations.

[Tessa Munt]

No, that is throwing one’s hands in the air. There is an opportunity for people to consider how they might take responsibility for their communities. As a second example, the isolated village of Priddy sits on top of the Mendip hills. When the weather is bad, the village is pretty much cut off. The children of Priddy have requested on a number of occasions that their parish council install photovoltaic panels. Originally, they wanted to put them on the school roof, but it turned out that the school roof was angled the wrong way. Happily, the village hall, just across the road, was absolutely suitable, and it was fitted with solar panels in 2010. Those cells generate 4,400 kWh of electricity and prevent the production of nearly 2,400 kg of CO₂ each year.

To generalise, Regen South West’s latest progress report for 2013 shows that the south-west region now supplies about 7.3% of its energy through renewable means, but at current rates of installation, we will not meet the target of 15% by 2020, which is worrying. I would love to see more projects like the Wedmore scheme that work with and for communities. Community schemes benefit not an individual but the whole community, and there are ways to spread the wealth around. There will always be room for corporate players in the market, especially in industrial areas and on brownfield sites, but in rural areas, the community and co-op model is far preferable. Once again, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes on bringing this debate to the fore.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan. I echo my colleagues in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) on securing this opportune debate. It is not anti-solar panels, but it is about ensuring that solar panels are installed on barn roofs, industrial buildings and individual residences, not in huge arrays.

The hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) mentioned solar paddocks of four or five acres. The problem in my constituency is that we virtually have whole farms—I am not exaggerating—of 70, 80 or 90 acres in individual applications. I assure Members that anyone who has bought their house or lived there for years and who looks out on a beautiful hillside does not want 90 acres of solar panels in front of them. There is nothing pretty about them. They have huge industrial fences around them. They are not part of the countryside. People do not come to Devon and Cornwall—or even Somerset, dare I say—to see solar panels; they come to see beautiful countryside and wonderful farming. They do not want to see solar panels; they want to see sheep and cattle. As for the number of sheep that will graze under the panels, I assure the Chamber that it will not be very many. If the light is being taken to produce electricity, how much grass will grow, given that it needs to photosynthesise? A lot of what is being discussed is complete and utter myth.

We have 7 billion people and want to feed the world, and our nation, but all we are doing is taking out acres and acres of good farmland. Solar panels are being proposed for grade 1 and 2 farmland in my constituency; we have proposals for Bampton, Morebath, around Tiverton and around Cullompton. Mid Devon appears to be the solar panel farm capital of the world, and the council is inundated with the number of applications.

[Dr Wollaston]

I have shown my hon. Friend an advert from Farmers Weekly. Does he agree that it verges on being fraudulent? It appears to show lush green grass growing directly underneath ground-mounted, large-scale solar panels.

[Neil Parish]

I suggest that the grass and the wonderful flowers in the picture my hon. Friend has shown me were there before the panels were put up—the panels can only just have been put up for the advertisers to get such a picture. The whole thing is—but perhaps I had better not say what I was going to say.

I echo the words of my hon. Friends: do not blame the farmers for what is going on; blame the companies. Basically, the companies are using a scattergun approach. If they apply as many times and for as many sites as possible, they will not get many applications through, but they will get one or two of them, so they keep going. All they do is terrorise the population of those areas, who see planning application after planning application, costing Mid Devon a fortune to process. The council is now asking for environmental impact assessments, but everything still has to be processed.

The Minister wants the money that we are using to subsidise solar panels—we should not forget that panels can only get into place with vast amounts of subsidy—to go on community projects and individual households, so that people get real benefits. The problem is, however, that the money seems to have landed up in the vast numbers of field projects, because the price of panels has halved. A year or so ago, the Minister got lambasted for reducing the tariff on solar panel production, but in the meantime the cost of the panels has dropped and they have become lucrative. In the end, it is all about producing money, and the panels are too profitable. That is the problem.

I urge the Minister, therefore, to reduce the tariff further, especially for the field panels, although I am sure he is not keen to do so after his previous experience of reducing it. That will ensure that the money goes where he intends it to go. The planning process is good, and I welcome what the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my right hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr Pickles), and his Department have done, in that local authorities will now have a great deal more say. My argument, however, is simple: if the panels are not profitable, we will not get them. We will not get 90-acre farms covered in solar panels if they are not profitable; if such undertakings are profitable, the companies will try to get them up and running.

Just over the border from me, I have industrial buildings that are covered in solar panels, which is a great place to put panels, and as other hon. Members have said, there are some large farm buildings around the area. That is absolutely right, because farm buildings on the whole are not things of great beauty, and putting solar panels on them might even increase their beauty, and they certainly would not detract from it. Do not take the panels out into acres and acres of land. Where would it stop? If we take all that grade 1 and 2 land out of food production, we will be short of food, and we do not actually need the solar panels.

I take huge issue with my hon. Friend the Member for Wells. The Hinkley power station is already there; I am the first to admit that Hinkley A and B are not things of great beauty, but they are already in place. If we add two new reactors that will produce 8% of the country’s total electricity needs in the same place, no one will notice. In fact, the new power stations will be marginally better looking than the previous ones. They will certainly produce electricity for the whole country—some 8%—and we would have to cover virtually half the country with solar panels in order to produce a similar amount of electricity. Furthermore, during dark times of year when little solar energy is produced, we would not get that electricity, whereas a nuclear power station is a base load, which is there and producing electricity all the time.

People are getting cross, because they feel that they are being sold green energy as a total solution, but I am sure that the Minister will admit that we need all types of green energy in order to balance. We have got the balance wrong. I do not blame him for that, because he has done his best to ensure that the money goes to community schemes and individuals, but we have to do much more. My local council in Mid Devon was successful in putting solar panels all over council and social housing, which has been a benefit of about £3 a week to many of the tenants, who are hard-pressed for cash—that is a great way of using the subsidy.

Finally, I ask the Minister to look at the issue again. All through the valleys of east and mid-Devon we have large power lines in many places. The companies follow the power lines all the way through the valleys, which are right out in the open. Even quite large farms can be accepted in places—if they have trees around them and are reasonably well hidden, that is fine. The companies will carry on following the power lines all through the south-west, because the region—Devon and Cornwall in particular—is especially good for panels, on account of the light and the amount of production possible, making them lucrative. I wish the Minister well, but I want him to do much more than make the DCLG changes to the planning system; we need to alter the tariffs to ensure that those huge solar farms are no longer profitable.

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[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)]

This has been an interesting and worthwhile debate, although I was slightly surprised at the interesting segue into the debate taken by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) with her little eulogy for Thomas Edison. It was enlightening, but I remind her that he also invented the electric chair. I suppose one must take the rough with the smooth.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston). This debate is not only important, it is extremely timely, and she has put her finger on the spot of a growing concern. I hope that this debate and the comments that I will make will nip in the bud what could be a very big problem and avert the loss of public support. I was fortunate to visit my hon. Friend’s beautiful constituency in the spring as part of a visit to Cornwall and Devon, and Transition Town Totnes is a genuinely inspiring community. What they have done and are planning to do there is a model that I hope will be rolled out in many communities across the country. Not only are they doing great things in their area, but they plan to share that with other people around the country.

I also know the hon. Lady shares my absolute conviction about the need to act against dangerous man-made climate change and about the imperative of growing the stock of renewable energy as part of our energy mix, but we have to do that in a balanced and careful way, and the two are not incompatible. Therefore, I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss what we might term the menace of inappropriate large-scale arrays, and hopefully, to allay some of the concerns that have been raised during the course of today’s debate.

As the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree suggested, I am a great supporter of solar. I like to think of myself as a champion of the technology. Certainly, while I have been Minister, over the past three years, we have deployed an unprecedented level of solar; almost 2.5 GW has been deployed during that time, which is quite a record. Solar PV is a genuinely exciting technology of the future. It is flexible, intuitive, and it can be deployed in a wide range of applications and locations as part of a mixed energy economy. Whether in domestic installations, on commercial roofs, or even, on a large scale, generating for the grid, it has a strong role to play in our energy mix of the future. However, make no mistake: I am keen to see more deployment and for the UK economy to maximise the benefits that a vibrant solar PV sector will bring.

[Neil Parish]

I do not know whether the Minister will come to my point about looking again at the amount of subsidy for large-scale solar farms, so as to ensure that they are not as highly profitable and lucrative as they are at the moment.

[Gregory Barker]

I will, but I am afraid I will have to disappoint my hon. Friend.

I am on record as stating my ambition, which has also been mentioned in the debate, of seeing up to 20 GW of solar deployed in Britain, building on the terrific 2.5 GW we have deployed since the coalition came to power. Let me put that in context: if we converted only 16% of suitable commercial and industrial rooftops, or only 8% of suitable roofs on our homes, or a mix of the two, that would be sufficient to meet my big 20 GW ambition.