The Energy Secretary has approved 12 solar schemes, he should say no to the East Park Energy Park in North Bedfordshire and Huntingdon

I called an adjournment debate in the Commons last week to discuss the proposed East Park Energy development – a 1900-acre ground-mounted solar plant and battery energy storage system spanning my constituency of North Bedfordshire and Huntingdon constituency. I wanted to highlight to the Government points, specific to the proposal, that warrant serious consideration for its rejection.

To give a sense of scale, the scheme would cover an area larger than Gatwick airport, on what is currently open countryside.

It is time we stop dressing these installations up as “solar farms” and describe them as what they are – vast industrialised complexes. This one is made up of 700,000 solar panels, each up to 3 metres high, along with fencing, lighting, CCTV, inverter stations, transformer units, battery storage infrastructure and cabling. That is a long way from what we would normally understand a farm to be.

Large-scale solar is frequently presented as the ‘cheap energy’ solution, but the reality is less straightforward. Although these plants boast high-capacity figures, their actual annual output is low, decreasing whenever the sun is not shining. They also demand heavy upfront capital, and the value of the electricity generated rarely offsets those costs. Ultimately, investors look for returns, so these costs will indirectly end up in the public purse.

There are also significant system costs. Solar’s intermittency creates swings in output: surges at midday in summer when demand is low, and nothing on winter evenings when demand peaks. Accommodating this volatility requires major and costly grid upgrades to infrastructure not designed for such abrupt fluctuations. To avoid overloading the network, solar is routinely curtailed, meaning consumers ultimately pay for energy that is never used.

Battery storage is increasingly being added to manage these swings, but in practice batteries earn more from arbitrage – buying electricity when prices are low and selling it back to the grid when prices rise – than from storing surplus solar. This fundamentally alters the economic case for large-scale solar -certainly from a public benefit point of view. Investor returns are boosted by adding battery capacity, but this substantial investment only makes financial sense when the purpose is to arbitrage energy costs. That is not really the intention of trying to get low-cost energy.

Now turning to the land itself, 74% of the land is classified as “best and most versatile” agricultural land. This is more than almost every single solar plant that has been adopted or accepted to date. The proposal lacks demonstration that lower-grade or brownfield land had seriously been sought – in contrast to national policy. At the very least, the scheme represents a generational loss of productive farmland – if not a permanent one. We cannot simply pave over our best farmland and hope that food security will come from somewhere else.

The Government also needs to consider the cumulative impacts of other significant projects in Bedfordshire. This comes in the context of Bedfordshire experiencing housing growth over the past decade at between two and three times the national average, which has placed considerable strain on surrounding infrastructure.

Bedfordshire currently has six nationally significant infrastructure projects. The first is the Black Cat roundabout, the country’s largest ongoing road project, which is in the direct area of East Park Energy. Secondly, East West Rail is the country’s third largest railway project, proposing to drive a line between Bedford and Cambridge. Thirdly, Universal Studios is the country’s most significant inward investment which will deliver 10 million visitors a year, with all the movement of people that entails, and the ancillary development around it.

Luton airport is also expanding, doubling in size from 18 million to 30 million passengers a year. And finally, there is a new settlement expected in Tempsford taking it from a village of 400 residents to a town of at least 40,000 new homes on land that encompasses and abuts land for East Park Energy. I do not believe there has been any adequate consideration of the cumulative impact these big projects may have in the proposal for East Park Energy.

The people of Bedfordshire are doing their bit – and more – but with so many significant projects happening all at once, at some point things are going to break.

My constituents are not opposed to energy resilience. They understand the pressures on the national grid and the need for long-term planning. What is not understood is why North Bedfordshire should be asked to absorb a development of such extraordinary scale, on land of such high agricultural value with so little clarity about the benefits and so little regard for the consequences.

The Minister has emphasised the need for public trust in the DCO process. Since the election, the Energy Secretary has approved all 12 solar schemes and has yet to refuse any. I believe there are good reasons why he should refuse this proposal.

I hope the Government will pause and reflect.