A quiet but sweeping transformation is underway across rural England. Beneath the banner of climate progress, hundreds of thousands of acres of the nation’s most fertile and biodiverse land are now under imminent threat.
A new analysis by the Stop Oversized Solar campaign reveals that the scale of solar power development in the UK is far more extensive and alarming than the government has admitted.
At stake is not merely the view from a village lane, the babbling brooks, the ancient oak forests or the fate of a few fields, but the future of our farmland, wildlife habitats, and the character of the countryside itself.
Eco-Suicide
“Mad” Ed Miliband and his grotesque eco-zealot Net Zero crusade will destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of England’s countryside.
According to the campaign’s findings, some 655,000 acres of cropland, an area equivalent to the entire county of Derbyshire, are currently targeted for solar development. This figure dwarfs the claims made by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), which has insisted that even the most ambitious solar expansion scenarios would affect less than one percent of UK agricultural land.
In reality, the solar pipeline now threatens to consume nearly three percent of it, with an astonishing five percent of the nation’s cropland marked for transformation into vast industrial energy farms.
Killing off fertile farmland
Much of this land lies in the UK’s agricultural heartlands: Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Yorkshire.
In some areas, such as Lincolnshire, a county long considered part of the country’s “breadbasket”, solar proposals are targeting up to nine percent of local farmland.
These figures are not theoretical; they represent actual planning applications, many of them well advanced. The implications are profound.
At a time when the UK already imports 40% of its food, sacrificing such an immense area of productive farmland for solar panels risks deepening our dependence on overseas supplies while undermining food security for decades to come.
Enablers of ecological destruction
This unprecedented shift has been quietly enabled by a significant policy change at DESNZ. Originally, the government’s Clean Power 2030 plan set separate targets for rooftop and ground-mounted solar schemes, with a preference for distribution-based projects like rooftop arrays on warehouses, car park canopies, and community installations.
But in April 2025, following a sustained lobbying campaign by solar developers, many of them backed by international investors, those separate targets were scrapped. In their place is a single-unified system that overwhelmingly favours large-scale, land-hungry solar farms, officially known as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs).
These NSIPs are no modest rural interventions. The Cleve Hill Solar Park in Kent, the only NSIP currently operational, spans 900 acres, yet it is among the smallest of what’s to come.
The average scheme now in the pipeline is approximately 2,000 acres, and one proposal exceeds 7,000. Each of these schemes has the footprint of an international airport and typically requires a minimum 40–60-year operating lifespan.
While developers often tout them as temporary, research by soil scientists, including studies commissioned by ADAS, suggests that such developments cause long-term, often irreversible, damage to soil structure and fertility, making eventual reversion to agriculture highly unlikely.
The government’s justification for this strategic pivot is rooted in its renewable energy targets. But even this rationale falters under scrutiny.
The UK’s solar power output is staggeringly inefficient: despite 17.8GW of installed capacity, the average output is just 1.77GW — equating to a meagre 9.9% yield. The World Bank ranks the UK 229th out of 230 countries for solar generation potential, yet Britain is now an outlier in its aggressive push to cover farmland with solar panels.
France, Italy and Germany ban solar development on agricultural land
Nations like France and Italy have taken steps to ban or restrict solar development on agricultural land, while Germany has sited its largest solar farms on former mines and airfields, none exceeding 600 acres. The UK’s approach stands in stark contrast.
The environmental costs extend beyond food production. The industrialisation of the countryside through mega solar installations fragments wildlife habitats, disrupts migration corridors, and displaces native species.
Once it’s gone – it’s gone forever
The hedgerows, meadows, and quiet, ecologically rich spaces that define rural England are being replaced with sterile grids of glass and metal. With so much land converted to energy production, biodiversity suffers and rural character is erased.
Inefficient and unsustainable
Ironically, this land grab proceeds even as the very systems needed to accommodate the additional solar power falter. The National Energy System Operator (NESO) has warned that grid connection queues are already oversubscribed.
In fact, the current solar pipeline totals 131GW, nearly double the government’s 2035 target of 70GW. During peak summer months, NESO has had to order solar sites to switch off due to oversupply, compensating developers for energy that is never used. With limited battery storage capacity, most systems store power for just a few hours, this oversaturation will likely lead to even more waste and higher curtailment payments.
Worse still, the reallocation of grid access to favour massive transmission-scale projects has sidelined smaller, local schemes. Thousands of rooftop solar proposals on retail parks, industrial buildings, car parks, and in community settings are now at risk of being crowded out—despite being highlighted as a priority in DESNZ’s own Solar Roadmap, published as recently as June 2025. This so-called “rooftop revolution” is being eclipsed by industrial-scale land-take, enabled by policy reversals and backroom lobbying.
STOP OVERSIZED SOLAR
Professor Tony Day, a spokesperson for Stop Oversized Solar, captures the frustration shared by many in rural communities.
“The more solar capacity we install, the more we rely on an unreliable source of energy. It’s much more logical to prioritise local schemes like rooftop arrays or car park canopies instead of blanketing good farmland with inefficient solar panels. Yet these are the very schemes now being squeezed out.”
This is not a question of being anti-renewables. It is a call for intelligent planning, proportion, and protection of the landscape. The industrial-scale solar schemes now being waved through do not represent green energy at its best. They represent an unsustainable and ill-considered reconfiguration of our countryside — driven not by need, but by developer interest and political expediency.
The campaign’s warning is stark: England is sleepwalking into a transformation of its rural landscape on a scale not seen since the Enclosure Acts of the 18th century.
What is being lost: productive farmland, vital habitats, and the pastoral identity of England itself may never be reclaimed.
If sustainability is truly the goal, then sacrificing our best land for the least efficient form of renewable energy is not progress. It’s a mistake we may not be able to undo. The great solar land grab will ensure Britain declines further into a dark, dystopian hellhole of ultimate self-destruction.
The cost on Britain’s wildlife is immeasurable this is eco suicide and destruction on a grand scale.
Labour are going to carpet over Britain with cheap migrant homes, concrete and wind farms.
Labour are an evil that needs to be purged from the UK. Never in my life have I seen such a horrific government as this NEVER!!!!
No one is talking about this in the MSM. This is the single biggest threat to our country in decades in centuries yet it is being ignored. Shame on the mainstream media really disgusted they are passing this by and letting it happen with no comment or discussion. SHAME!
Thank you for posting this article. It is absolutely disgraceful that they are going ahead with these horrible solar panel schemes over fertile farm land. What on earth are these people thinking? As it is the Labour government is punishing farmers to the hilt and many are either going bust or having to sell up because of Labour’s lunatic IHT land grab.
More Miliband nonsense. The dafties at Labour are turning our country into a toilet. We hardly get any sun in the UK and even with specialist solar panels it don’t make any difference.
No one is talking about this thank you Daily Squib ofr bringing it up.
I have not read this in any of the mainstream media and I can understand why they’re suppressing it. If it weren’t for you guys it would be hushed up. Thank you for doing something about it. We need to show people that our country our farmland is being desecrated by these insane eco-zealot lunatics.
The UK is finished if someone does not rise up and do something about this.
Why did my last post not get posted? wtf
Any way what I was trying to say is that the communities being targeted by the gov. need to organise themselves and to never relent. Protest all day and all night to stop this madness of solar farms on fertile land.
Thanks for sharing, beautiful farmland in Bedfordshire is at risk of being covered with 1,900 acres of solar panels – larger than 1,000 football pitches. This is wrong. Put solar panels on car parks, roofs or brownfield sites rather than on our green and pleasant land.
Our countryside used to be a sacred place and now they’re desecrating it.
I cannot fathom how disgusted I am at Labour and that horrid imp Miliband. Someone needs to do somethinf for effs sake.
All you doom sayers are idiots of the highest degree. So what if they are building solar over farmland. It is only a tiny fraction of the UK’s capacity for farming. Don’t worry you will still get your oats or whatever you morons eat. Try going on a diet for a change eh?
I hate the UK now what has it become? The disgraceful building of solar farms on our countryside is the last turning point until Britain is gone forever. We will just have miles and miles of solar and wind farms so that the brainwashed populations can read their Facebook or Twitter. Bloody hell, what is this nation now its a bloody toilet its dead in the water
Time to leave these shores forevr. After reading this I made up my mind. I don’t want to be a part of this and I refuse to PAY for it as well. It’s our taxpayer money that is funding this mess.