UK Solar Farms Are Pointless, Toxic and Unsustainable

Written by John O'Sullivan CEO Principia Scientific International on July 16, 2026. Posted in Current News

Britain is being told to plaster its beautiful green countryside with solar farms as though geography were a minor inconvenience. It is not.

The nation is set to build a large-scale solar strategy on poor solar ground, on some of its best farmland, and under a financial model that makes the projects attractive to developers even when they make little sense for the nation.

Lets start with the World Bank’s global study on what it determines to be practical solar PV potential. It compares countries on usable solar resource, not wishful thinking, and Britain comes out near the bottom of the world table, with only Ireland faring worse.

That is not an anti-renewable talking point; it is a physical reality. Solar power only makes sense as a prime energy source where the sun is abundant and reliable. Britain is cloudy, northerly, and seasonal.

The problem is not just that we get less sun than sunnier countries. It is that our solar output is badly mismatched with demand.

London receives about 0.52 kWh per square metre per day in December and 4.74 in July — roughly a ninefold difference.

In other words, the panels work hardest when the heating demand is lowest, and weakest when heating demand is highest.

Across the year, UK solar’s capacity factor is around 9.6%, which means the system spends most of its life producing a fraction of its rated output.

That is not a description of a robust national energy backbone. It is a description of a heavily weather-dependent supplement.

And then there is the land.

Solar farms are not being built on spare land in the abstract. They are clustering in rural eastern England, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Kent, and Essex — places where developers can assemble huge sites on flat, contiguous ground with relatively straightforward grid access.

Those are also some of the most productive agricultural landscapes in the country.

The irony is hard to miss: we are turning over fertile farmland to a technology that performs poorly here, in order to  ‘save carbon’ while sacrificing food-producing capacity.

That trade-off matters more than the official language admits. Government and parliamentary guidance repeatedly says the best and most versatile agricultural land should be protected, and that solar should be pushed first toward rooftops, brownfield land, car parks, and lower-grade sites where possible.

That is because once you cover productive farmland with panels, access roads, fencing, cables, and maintenance compounds, it stops being fully productive farmland. Even if some grazing continues underneath, the land is no longer being used at its best and highest purpose.

The defenders of solar farms usually answer with two claims. First, that Britain needs every possible source of ‘clean’ electricity. Second, that solar farms only cover a tiny share of national farmland.

The first claim is dogma based on a misrepresentation of how polluting solar panel materials, manufacturer and end of life disposal truly are. A study showed they fail much sooner than claimed.

While ‘green’ advocates commonly use the terms ‘renewable’, ‘sustainable’, and ‘net zero’ to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills. Even the pro-green European Union estimated it “will cumulatively amass 6-13 and 21-35 million tonnes of [solar] waste by 2040 and 2050, respectively.”

The second claim is a classic numerical dodge: a small percentage of the national total can still mean a large loss of the very best land, especially when the sites are concentrated in the most agriculturally valuable counties.

What really drives the expansion is not just ideology. It is finance.

Utility-scale solar farms are being made attractive by government-backed revenue certainty. Under the Contracts for Difference system, developers secure long-term strike prices, with recent solar awards around £65 per MWh, backed by consumers if market prices fall below the contract level. That arrangement sharply reduces risk and makes financing easier.

In plain English, the state gives developers something very close to a guaranteed income stream. That is why projects keep moving forward even when local communities resist them and the climate makes them a weak fit.

There are also smaller grants for some farm-level solar installations, which further smooth the path. None of this is inherently scandalous. Do-gooder public support for new energy technologies is understandable. But support should be rational. It should reward the right technology in the right place.

A subsidy system that effectively nudges developers toward the easiest, cheapest land — even when that land is some of the best farmland in Britain — is not a neutral market correction. It is a policy choice with visible costs.

Worst yet, it isnt UK manufacturing that benefits but China’s because ‘Great British Energy’ solar panels are made in China. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband promised no solar panels from Chinese slave labour. He lied.

The deeper issue is that the powers that be are confusing what is politically convenient with what is strategically wise. Solar is easiest to approve on open countryside because the land is available, the projects are large, and the numbers look neat in planning documents.

But that does not make the choice intelligent. A country with weak solar conditions, a highly constrained land base, and genuine food-security concerns should not make utility-scale solar farms its default answer.

Let them still build solar. But build it where it belongs: on rooftops, over car parks, on warehouses, on brownfield land, and on genuinely poor land where agriculture would not be displaced. But don’t keep lying to us that it is ‘clean and renewable‘ because the evidence proves otherwise.

Study Finds Solar Panels Aren’t As ‘Green’ As Proponents Claim

Video: The Mystery Flaw of Solar Panels

Solar Panels both Pollute & Heat The Earth

Solar Panels Creating a Huge Waste Problem

Solar Panel Toxic Waste ‘A Ticking Time Bomb’

New Study: Solar Panel Owners Sit On A Pile Of Toxic Lead & Cadmium

Solar Panels Generate 300 Times More Toxic Waste Than Nuclear Reactors

The above links are just a sample of some of the horrific stories we posted on Principia Scientific highlighting the downsides of solar. But large ground-mounted solar farms are wrong on so many levels they should be banned outright. Right now, the opposite is happening.

And that is the real indictment. We are not being forced by nature into this policy. We are choosing it. We are choosing to treat the countryside as a convenient surface for a badly matched technology, instead of preserving high-grade farmland for the purpose it serves best: feeding people.

References

1. World Bank, Solar Photovoltaic Power Potential by Country.

2. World Bank / Solargis global PV potential study.

3. London solar irradiance figures cited in UK solar reference material.

4. UK solar capacity factor data for 2024.

5. UK Parliament House of Commons Library, Planning for solar farms.

6. GOV.UK and parliamentary guidance on protecting best and most versatile agricultural land.

7. BBC reporting on large solar farm proposals and approvals in eastern England and Lincolnshire.

8. BBC reporting on the Springwell solar farm in Lincolnshire.

9. BBC reporting on the solar auction and the pace of solar construction.

10. UK CfD auction reporting on solar strike prices and long-term revenue support.

About the author: John O’Sullivan is CEO and co-founder (with Dr Tim Ball among 45 scientists) of Principia Scientific International (PSI).  He is a seasoned science writer, retired teacher and legal analyst who assisted skeptic climatologist Dr Ball in defeating UN climate expert, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann in the multi-million-dollar ‘science trial of the century‘. From 2010 O’Sullivan led the original ‘Slayers’ group of scientists who compiled the book ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory’ debunking alarmist lies about carbon dioxide plus their follow-up climate book. His most recent publication, ‘Slaying the Virus and Vaccine Dragon’ broadens PSI’s critiques of mainstream medical group think and junk science.