We Need Grass, Not Glass

DEVON HIT BY MEGASOLAR PROPOSAL AT HOLSWORTHY

Help us save 2700 acres of prime farmland at Holsworthy and 279 more acres at Bulworthy

Solar Farms Are Spreading Across Devon’s World-Class Farmland

Here in Devon, as elsewhere across the country, a rash of huge solar farm applications is raining down on Local Planning Authorities. Devon was an early target because land is comparatively cheap and the South West is ‘sunny’. By the start of 2025 we had more than 4,500 acres of solar arrays, the equivalent of over 30 average-sized Devon farms. Black glass and toxic chemicals are taking over large swathes of the world’s best livestock-rearing farmland, which produces £600 million worth of food for the country every year.

Some key facts about solar

Solar farms in England operate at a 10.25 ‘capacity factor’ – in other words, over the course of a year they produce just over one-tenth of the electricity they could theoretically produce. Because when it isn’t sunny, they do nothing. That includes night time. And Devon has 62% cloud cover annually.

In 2020, the World Bank published a multi-factor study of 230 countries around the world, assessing their suitability to produce solar energy effectively and economically. The UK was no 229. Only Ireland was considered less viable.

Solar energy is not ‘cheap abundant energy’. The cost of building it is high, it attracts heavy subsidies to encourage investors, its intermittent output is a huge problem for the National Grid, which is spending billions to try and handle it, including building 40 new gas-fired power stations to ‘balance’ the unreliable supply. The panels are mostly made by forced labour in China, and are unrecyclable. The megabatteries being installed to try and smooth out their supply are a major potential risk to nearby communities.

Surely we need these for Net Zero? The government’s renewable-energy target for 2030, when our power generating capacity is due to be fully carbon-neutral, is 150GW. Looking forward to 2050, given increasing demand for electricity, it is estimated to double to 300GW. As of October 2025, there are 770GW of renewables projects already in the queue for Grid connections.

CPRE’s Rooftop First research has shown that solar on rooftops, feeding straight into local users to reduce demand on the Grid (and avoid the Grid’s balancing problems), could easily achieve 60% of the Net Zero target by 2030, and 117% of the target for 2050. We have at last obtained a commitment from the government to mandate solar panels on all new-builds in their Future Homes Standard – but it’s not enough to save our precious farmland.

Solar farm ‘clustering’

Solar farms designed to produce less than 100MW of power are dealt with locally, by Local Planning Authorities. These are heavily weighted by the government, and for the first time in 2025 a proposal turned down by a local council for what were admitted to be perfectly good policy-based reasons was allowed on appeal by a Planning Inspector – effectively making the evidence-based local planning system redundant if the government wants something badly enough.

We continue to see these smaller, local applications come in, often creating huge ‘clusters’ around a site where they can connect to the National Grid. Around the Alverdiscott grid node, three sites are built or planned – Litchardon Cross (164 acres built), Gammaton Moor (137 acres approved) and now Bulworthy (279 acres applied for). With the smaller sites in the area, this amounts to a cluster of some 700 acres, a ‘mini megasolar’ which we are working with local residents to oppose. Objections received after the technical consultation deadline can still be influential.

It’s a similar story at Pyworthy, near Holsworthy, where a 164-acre site was approved in 2021 – and upheld despite a Judicial Review we mounted with huge support from residents including actor John Nettles – the ‘cluster effect’ means that there is now an acre of solar panels for every house in this rural village. Many other areas around the county can tell the same story. But now it’s getting very much worse.

But now it’s getting very much worse.

The megasolar ‘gold rush’

Plans for gigantic solar farms of between 50MW and 800MW capacity have been springing up across the flat lands of the East of England – the breadbasket of the nation, for several years.

In October 2025, this megasolar ‘gold rush’ hit Devon, with a proposal for 2,700 acres of solar around Holsworthy Beacon. This would be one of the largest yet proposed in England, and even in Europe.

This development demonstrates that solar energy is now a ‘bubble market’. With two political parties having declared that they will dismantle the Net Zero targets and stop pouring public money into the renewables industry, investors are piling in, in ever larger projects, to exploit the opportunity while it exists. Three megasolar projects have been consented in Lincolnshire in the past 15 months, totalling 6,700 acres between them. Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Oxford, Kent, North Wales, South Wales, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Northants, Nottinghamshire… the list of new NSIP solar plans goes on.

Our concern is that when the bubble bursts, those corporate operators and their international investors will disappear – leaving huge areas of uneconomic, unsubsidised, unrecyclable black glass and toxic chemicals for local communities to clear up.

These megasolar projects aren’t decided by local communities. As Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) they are decided by the government.

So only mass voter-power can keep them at bay.

Please sign our petition SAY NO TO BEACON SOLAR and share it far and wide. We know that people all over the country are appalled that Devon’s landscape is being targeted for these huge schemes, and we want the maximum possible weight of numbers to bring to bear on the government.