Natalie Bennett, who is the newly elected Green party leader, recently visited the proposed site for, what would be, the largest solar panel farm in the UK and the second largest in Europe.
Ib vogt’s proposed park would provide 47MW of solar generating capacity and would be ten times the size of their Ebbsfleet solar panel park.
Commenting on the plans she said: “This solar farm will put Fareham at the forefront of the green energy revolution that is needed to curb climate change and secure this country’s energy supply.”
She is of the opinion that developments of solar panel farms are low-impact when compared with the likes of shale gas fracking that she believes to be an extreme way of generating energy. As fracking involves such things as blowing up the ground she feels that the choice is not a difficult one to make – the creation of a solar panel farm should be the obvious route to go.
Natalie Bennett added: “We are talking about having wild flowers growing, sheep grazing and the rights of way maintained, not a large-scale housing development.
‘The fact is that we do need more energy and we need to do a lot of work on energy conservation. Even if we do all we can, we still need low and zero carbon energy sources.’
The proposals have received a mixed reception from local residents with Sean Woodward, a local councillor, expressing his view that the proposal is shocking and will cause concern to people living in Fareham and Stubbington. He pointed out that the particular part of the countryside in question was strategically situated between Stubbington and South Fareham and that, should a planning application be placed before the local planning authority next month they will need to take into account the impact on the environment such as power generation, the prospect of people being able to see thousands of solar panels and the loss of land that could have been used for agricultural purposes in the future.
