Solar Farm

This page is a home for articles about the proposed Kingsway solar farm in West Wratting. Last updated 15th November 2024.

The originally proposed solar and battery farm was big, but updated proposals (October 2024) increase its size even further from 780 hectares (1900 acres) to 1400 hectares (3500 acres). That’s 3 times larger than the biggest solar farm in Europe, which is built on a disused open cast mine. The solar farm will cover more than 50% of the area of West Wratting Parish, and now extends up to houses on the High Street. If that’s hard to imagine, think of an area that’s almost 2 miles wide and 3 miles long. It’s equivalent to 2470 football pitches.

Here’s an updated schematic map showing the overall scale of the solar farm.

Schematic map of the solar farm around West Wratting

This is based on Kingsway’s own map.

Zooming-in you can see the new area of solar farm (in blue) extends right up to the back of houses along the high street, so that it almost surrounds us.

Satelite image of West Wratting showing the Solar Farm areas nearest the village.

The blue area shown here is the newly added part, which belongs to the d’Abo’s estate; it looks like they’re selling up.

An action group has been formed to protest against the Kingsway Solar Farm Project. There is now a great new ‘Kingsway Solar Community Action‘ webpage, and they have useful flyers to inform you about objections to the solar farm. The manifesto for KSCA 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 KSCA.

Several sources of online information, e.g., Suffolk News, incorrectly said that the developer gave a presentation to West Wratting Parish Council (WWPC) in early 2024. That is not true. One member of WWPC did hear about a meeting at Balsham (on 18th March) just a few days before so attended and took notes. That night they wrote this post on the West Wratting website to spread the word, and then sent it to our village newsletter, Challenge, for publication in April.

Kingsway Solar Ltd will be holding a public information event in West Wratting Village Hall from 10:00 am – 2:00 pm on Saturday 16th November.

Image of the table of consultation events.

West Wratting Parish Council met privately with a senior employee of the developer (David Vernon, Downing Renewable Developments) on 12th November. We had a 2.5 hour question and answer session with him. I’ll post my notes on this here soon.

Useful Links

  • A slightly smaller 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 wrote to all the candidates that stood for election in South Cambridgeshire in 2024 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 before voting day 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.

    I have since received an email from our constituency MP, Pippa Heylings, who is the Lib Dem spokesperson on energy security and net zero, and is also on the Great British Energy Bill Committee. She said:

    I have previously spoken out against this proposal and I have been presented with no reason to change my mind. There is, of course, a need for more renewable energy but it is vital that planning for this is guided by a proper land use framework rather than sites being chosen by developers at random. In Westminster, I am pushing for the land use framework that Labour mentioned in their manifesto to be brought forward as well as raising concerns on the importance of community consultation on these schemes and for community benefits. I have also spoken in chamber and in the Great British Energy Bill Committee on the need for community energy projects to be given attention in this Bill.

  • The Kingsway Solar Community Action facebook group have produced a useful map showing the quality of agricultural land under the solar farm. Kingsway have said “We understand that the protection of agricultural land is a key concern in Cambridgeshire. We are completing an independent agricultural land classification (ALC) survey to assess the quality of the land within the Site and its surrounds. This will inform our efforts to prioritise development in areas of lower agricultural value. This will update the previous ALC surveys that exist, that are 36 years old. These assessments are undertaken with methodologies agreed with Natural England“.

Simon Chandler