It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan.
I will start by making it clear that I am not here to deny the pressing need for alternative energy sources, and I am in no doubt about the threats that we face from the twin hazards of peak oil prices and rising greenhouse gas emissions. I also want to acknowledge the work of Rob Hopkins and Transition Town Totnes in my constituency. They have inspired not only a national movement but an international movement that is leading the way in taking practical steps towards more sustainable and resilient communities.
There is widespread support, in my constituency and nationally, for roof-mounted solar photovoltaic systems. Projects such as Transition Streets in Totnes, which the Minister very kindly visited in April, bring communities together, and they look at energy saving as well as microgeneration. I hope that the Minister can set out in his response to this debate how he plans to support community energy projects such as this, which have the potential to be rolled out at scale. However, I will not dwell on that issue in detail, because I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) will elaborate further on community energy when she speaks.
I thank the Minister for his response this morning in oral questions, because it went to the nub of this issue. We do not want to resist solar PV as such; we want to resist inappropriate solar PV. I was immensely relieved, as all my constituents will be, to hear that he is working so closely with his colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government to bring forward a change to planning regulations, in order to make it very clear to planners and local councillors that local opinion, the need to protect our heritage and our rural landscape, and all the other factors that matter so much to local communities, cannot automatically be overridden because of the need to go forward on renewable energy.
Perhaps I can just set out the scale of where we are and say why communities are so worried. At the moment, we have 1.6 GW of solar capacity within the UK, and almost all of that is in microgeneration. The average scale is 4/1,000th of a megawatt and only 71 of the current 369,912 sites that are listed on the renewables obligation and feed-in tariff database are more than 500 kW in size. To put that in context, that would be a site of more than 2.5 acres. These sites contribute just 203 MW of that total 1.6 GW of installed capacity. However, if we look at the Department of Energy and Climate Change planning database, we see that 1.7 GW is in the planning pipeline or under construction, which is even greater than the solar capacity that we currently have installed. The point is that most of that 1.7 GW is completely different; it is not microgeneration but large-scale generation. In fact, more than half of it is very large-scale; we are talking about projects that are more than 5 MW. To put that in context, 1 MW requires around five acres of land, so more than half of that 1.7 GW that is in the pipeline will be of a scale greater than 25 acres. That is the nub of this issue.
I will put that figure in context again by looking at the impact on Totnes. My constituency covers an area from Holne on Dartmoor down to the sea; it takes in an area of outstanding natural beauty, several sites of special scientific interest and several special areas of conservation. South Hams district council has received 28 applications for large-scale solar projects: 25 have been approved and they are either in construction or awaiting construction; one is at appeal; and just two have been withdrawn. It is hard to convey the scale of these projects, or how much they cause devastation to the landscape; people have to see them to understand why communities are so worried about them. Anyone who travels north from Diptford, which is a tiny community in a beautiful rural setting, will come over the brow of a hill and see the development at a place called Blue Post, and they will be in no doubt whatever about what the future holds if we do not do something about this issue. There are more than 20 acres of densely packed, ground-mounted panels. Anyone who wants to see this site can look on my Twitter feed and there is a photograph of what these things look like close at hand. Effectively, the site is an industrialised desert, and it is a world away from the misleading and I have to say—frankly—fraudulent impression given in some of the glossy advertising that is being targeted directly at farmers.
However, I must say that farmers are the one group that I do not blame for any of this development. If farmers’ cattle are suffering from the devastating effects of bovine TB and the farmers repeatedly see their beautiful herds of South Devon cows being culled, while they are also under pressure from falling milk prices and face losing their family farms, and through their letterbox they receive a deluge of advertising that promises them up to £1,000 an acre per year for having solar panels installed on their land, together with a maintenance contract, who on earth would not decide to do that?