Huge row as big 2,000-acre photo voltaic farm to be constructed overlooking King Charles’s Highgrove | UK | News | EUROtoday

An enormous row has damaged out over plans to construct a big photo voltaic farm on land subsequent to the King’s Highgrove property. Lime Down Solar Park goals to have a era capability of 500 megawatts of fresh vitality to energy roughly 115,000 houses in Wiltshire and simply throughout the border in Gloucestershire.

The 2,000-acre photo voltaic farm is deliberate to be only a stone’s throw away from King Charles’s Highgrove property.

But there’s fury from those that oppose the plans who say that the “profit-making monstrosity” shall be a blight on the panorama, experiences The Times.

Planning paperwork reveal that almost all of the park could be constructed north of the M4 and south of Malmesbury in north Wiltshire in addition to on a part of the Duke of Beaufort’s 52,000-acre property in Gloucestershire.

The Duke is on pleasant phrases with the King as Highgrove House is simply 9 miles away. Now, nevertheless, campaigners are combating the photo voltaic farm and a bunch has launched a web-based petition to “prohibit ‘mega solar facilities’ over 50MW on UK farmland”.

Tracy Somerset, an actress turned environmentalist, is the Duke’s former spouse and can be opposing the plans. She nonetheless lives on the property in a separate home.

She stated: “Solar panels should be on roofs, along motorways, or industrial sites.” She added: “Land should be for growing food, not profits for a few landowners, manufacturers and investors.

“Be careful what the climate change fearmongering will lull us into accepting.”

The Stop Lime Park motion group stated the “profit-making monstrosity” would wreck the panorama and curtail “productive agricultural land”.

The group stated: “This is not an anti-solar campaign. We believe that large industrial solar farms should be located on former industrial sites or next to motorways, not on productive farmland.”

James Gray, the Conservative MP for North Wiltshire, opposes the plans.

On his website he said: “Of the ten largest solar parks in England, eight are in our beloved county…We have 42 operational solar farms with a further 12 under planning or construction, nearly all in the north of the county.

“They cover 3,000 acres, which is more than any other county in England…

“And now we have an absolutely outrageous application for vast new solar parks under the misleadingly rustic title ‘Lime Down Solar Park’.

“It will be 2,000 acres of vanity mirrors stretching from Luckington to Malmesbury, from Sherston to Hullavington, from the M4 to Corston.

“It will require dozens of hideous battery storage units, and miles and miles of road disruption to get the electricity to Melksham and thence into the grid.”

He added that it could be “an absolutely monstrous destruction of some of the most lovely landscapes in north Wiltshire”.

Island Green Power is behind the scheme that it says will generate low-cost, clear electrical energy in addition to storing low-carbon energy.

A spokesman for the Duke informed the Times: “The property’s determination is industrial and aligns with authorities steerage that the event of low-carbon infrastructure, reminiscent of photo voltaic farms, is a important nationwide precedence.”

Express.co.uk has contacted Buckingham Palace and Island Green Power for remark.