Oxfordshire's quintessential English countryside has inspired countless authors, including JRR Tolkien, JM Barrie and Beatrix Potter, to write of fields of wheat, barley and oilseed rape spread across the rolling hills.
However, that landscape, like much of rural England, is at risk of change with a new harvest of the sun's energy increasingly being harnessed by solar farms, part of the UK government's plan to ramp up capacity to meet its clean energy target by 2030.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband backs solar power as it is relatively cheap and quick to install. "It is just common sense to make sure it powers even more UK homes and businesses," he said recently. "This will not only help to cut carbon emissions but communities stand to benefit, too, from secure home-grown energy and lower energy costs."
Botley West is one of several solar farms in the pipeline aimed at bringing this secure, low-cost energy to the UK's electricity grid. The company behind it, Photovolt Development Partners (PVDP), is leasing around 1,375 hectares from the historic Blenheim Estate in Oxfordshire, once the home of Winston Churchill. The planned solar farm should generate enough energy to power 330,000 houses.
"The reason Blenheim decided to do this is they had a green manifesto to [reduce] their carbon footprint," Mark Owen-Lloyd, Botley West project developer at PVDP, told The National. "Secondly, they wanted to do something to improve their land. This land [where the solar farm will be] is really unproductive, it's exhausted. But Blenheim hasn't stopping farming – they've got another 18,000 acres [7,285 hectares] that they're farming on."
Sounds perfect – all you have do is point solar panels at the sun and all the homes in Oxfordshire could potentially receive clean solar energy. But not all are happy. Many residents object to what is called "visual harm" – spoiling views of rural idylls with rows of solar panels. Others, including many farmers, worry about changing the use of land from food or animal feed production to energy generation.
The UK's energy security minister under the previous Conservative administration, Claire Coutinho, argued clean energy goals could not trump food security. “I want to see more solar on rooftops and, where that’s not possible, for agricultural land to be protected and for the cumulative impact on villages to be considered where they are facing a high number of solar farm applications," she said this year.
Mr Miliband is known to be a fan of both Ms Coutinho's suggestions. Only weeks after taking office in July, he granted building consent for three solar farms in England: Gate Burton Energy Park in Lincolnshire, Sunnica Energy Farm on Suffolk's border with Cambridgeshire and Mallard Pass Solar Farm in Lincolnshire. Others, such as Botley West, are waiting in the wings. When completed, Sunnica and Gate Burton will each have a capacity of 500 megawatts, while Mallard Pass will be able to generate 350MW of electricity. In total, the UK has installed more than 14.4 gigawatts of solar power capacity, with one third coming from rooftop solar panels and the rest from farms.
The numbers, however, show the UK is way behind the likes of Germany, which actually installed 14.1GW in 2023 alone, nearly doubling the 2022 figure. The UK government, meanwhile, has committed to quadrupling solar energy generation and storage capacity by 2030, effectively bringing the total up to 42GW. One of the quickest ways it sees of achieving that is by approving the construction of many more solar farms like Botley West.
'Critical national priorities'
Solar farms do need planning permission, of course, but since January there has been an important distinction – those with a planned capacity of fewer than 50MW need approval from local authorities. Larger ones above 50MW are designated a "critical national priority" and are generally granted permission by the Energy Secretary, currently Mr Miliband. But that doesn't mean it's all plain sailing for the solar farm developers.
PVDP sent its proposals to the government's planning inspectorate early last month, after two public consultations and two years of trying to convince residents that the solar farm would be good for them in terms of cheaper electricity, as well as being good for the economy and the planet. But campaign group Stop Botley West has said the proposed site is far too big, "of a scale that's entirely inappropriate for this region". The group also claims the project's two million solar panels and 114km of security fencing would cause "visual harm" and even exacerbate flooding.
Mr Owen-Lloyd is adamant all interested and affected parties in the area have been consulted over the past two years. He feels there's always a strong element of Nimbyism (not-in-my-back-yard) at play in these types of cases. "In the end, their arguments may hold no weight with the planning inspector, because the inspector only deals in hard facts and in government energy policy," he told The National. "That's what the DCO (development consent order) is designed to do – rise above local objections where national policy is concerned."
Meanwhile, Alex Rogers, chairman of Stop Botley West, said the campaign group would present "extremely strong" evidence to the inspectorate. He also criticised PDVP for making "almost no changes" following the consultations.
Inheritance tax changes
Changes in inheritance tax (IHT) in UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves's budget at the end of October are starting to play a role in solar farming as well. At the moment, agricultural land is exempt from IHT, so farmers can pass estates down to their children intact. From April 2026, the first £1 million ($1.25 million) of combined business and agricultural assets of an estate will continue to attract no IHT. However, for assets above this threshold, the relief will reduce from 100 per cent to 50 per cent, resulting in an effective tax rate of 20 per cent. The government maintains that small farms should not be affected by the changes, but Mid Norfolk MP George Freeman told the UK Parliament that the reforms were an underhand way of freeing up more agricultural land for solar power, as farmers increasingly faced IHT bills. "The people hanging over Mid Norfolk waiting to buy the land are the big solar developers and the big mass housing developers," he said.
Renewable energy expert Gareth Phillips, a partner at Pinsent Masons and adviser on the Mallard Pass Solar Farm, said as a result of the budget changes "landowners will now be much more incentivised to look at leasing land to renewable developers as a way of finding new income streams to top up the loss".
"It may also trigger more sales of farm land by those who need to fund the payment of inheritance tax, meaning more land becomes available for different uses," he added.
Future tech
Technological advancement means solar panels will become smaller and more efficient and, therefore, the size of the farms will shrink radically. As solar panels become smaller and lighter, there will be far more viable options to place them on rooftops across the country, rather than in open fields.
"That's one of the reasons why we [in the solar farm development industry] go for temporary-consent, limited-time leases," Mr Owen-Lloyd told The National. "The belief is there will be another technology. Also, in the last 10 years the efficiency of solar technology has gone up by a factor of about 300 per cent, so the hope is that panels will be smaller for the same output and therefore will need less land."
However, the real game-changer could come in the shape of new light-absorbent materials that will be able to generate power from the sun on any surface, from a car roof to a backpack. Scientists at the University of Oxford this year came up with a new light-absorbing material that's thin and flexible enough to apply to the surface of almost any building or common object. Essentially, such material has the potential to make the photovoltaic cells within solar panels redundant. At just over one micron thick, it is almost 150 times thinner than the silicon wafers used in traditional photovoltaics.
"By using new materials which can be applied as a coating, we’ve shown we can replicate and outperform silicon while also gaining flexibility," said Dr Junke Wang, fellow of physics at the University of Oxford. "This is important because it promises more solar power without the need for so many silicon-based panels or specially-built solar farms."
It's very early days for this technology but, theoretically, it could lead to a world where your home's electricity needs are met through coating to your house with such material, your electric car could get solar energy into its batteries by having anything applied to its roof and your mobile phone could maintain its charge by way of your hat. And no need to cover the countryside with solar panels.
