Solar Farm

This page is a home for articles about the proposed Kingsway solar farm in West Wratting.

The solar farm and battery complex will be huge. Its 900 hectares (2224 acres) covers 50% of the area of West Wratting Parish. If that’s hard to imagine, think of an area that’s one mile wide and 3.5 miles long. It’s equivalent to 1.25 million football pitches.

Several sources of online information, e.g., Suffolk News, have incorrectly said that the developer gave a presentation to West Wratting Parish Council (WWPC). That is not true. One member of WWPC did hear about the Balsham meeting (on 18th March) just a few days before so attended and took notes. That night they wrote this post on the WW website to spread the word, and then sent it to Challenge for publication in April. There’s nothing underhand going on here!

  • An action group has been formed to protest against the Kingsway Solar Farm Project. ‘Kingsway Solar Community Action‘ is a facebook group with an associated private Messenger discussion group. The manifesto for the facebook group says:

    This group is not anti-Solar. It is, however dedicated to advocating for our community’s interests and resisting the proposed 900 hectare (2224 acres) Kingsway Solar Farm, which would affect Balsham, West Wratting, and Six Mile Bottom. We aim to share information about the application, important deadlines, and effective actions, as well as provide comprehensive knowledge to bolster the case for rejecting this proposal.

    If you wish to protest against the Solar Farm proposal then please contact that facebook group. One of the most constructive reasons for objecting is probably the competition between energy security of the UK and food security, as described in this well-written article. Arguments that are based on the relative merits of solar vs. wind are usually factually incorrect.
  • A similarly sized solar farm (2,500-acre) proposed for just North of Newmarket was approved by the new Labour Government in their first week in office (see this BBC article). Essentially the Government decided that “the public benefits outweigh the harm identified”. That project is a useful precedent for what may happen to West Wratting.

    The website for “Say No to Sunnica” outlines the reasons put forward by that community action group for opposing the project.
  • Joint letter from Lucy Frazer (Conservative Party, Ely and East Cambridgeshire) and Matt Hancock (Conservative, West Suffolk) objecting to the Sunnica Solar Farm.
  • I have written to all the candidates that are currently standing for election in South Cambridgeshire to ask for their party’s national policy on the use of agricultural land for solar farms, and for their personal views on the proposed Kingsway development. The only written reply I received was from the Green party, who said

    The Green Party’s targets are for 100 GW of Solar in the UK energy mix by 2035. Predominantly, we seek to prioritise schemes that install Solar PV on residential and commercial rooftops in a way that balances our energy needs with the need to protect biodiversity and our food supply. Contrary to how it’s often presented in the media, it is not Green Party policy to cover vast swathes of arable land under Solar PV, and there have been plenty of instances where Green Councillors have voted against Solar farm schemes due to their unsuitability on those concerns.
  • A map for the proposed Solar Farm has appeared on the Balsham website, dated 7th March 2024. It appears to be from Downing LLP who own Kingsway Solar Farm Ltd.

https://www.balsham.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Solar-Farm-Map.png

I’ve used this new map to update the map for the Challenge article and on this webpage.

The map on slide 13 of the presentation on Kingsway’s website is similar, but the boundaries are harder to see.

To try to make these clearer I’ve redrawn them as this colour image (parish boundaries shown in red, solar farm boundary in orange)

And here’s a black and white simplified version, with parish boundaries shown by dot-dash lines …