The Shape of Solar Scotland Starts Here

Craig DalzellSometimes national politics becomes extremely local indeed. When that happens on my doorstep, I can’t help but get involved.This summer, a proposal was put to South Lanarkshire Council to build a solar energy farm just outside my village. Not just a small one either. At 100MW, it would be the largest solar farm to date not just in Scotland but in the whole of the UK – more than a third again larger than the 72MW farm in Shotwick, Wales. Its footprint will be comparable to the entire village itself. It’ll also be backed by a 100MW capacity bank of batteries to support matching supply with demand. For reference, this is approximately ten times the size of the farm that would be required to meet the current electricity demands of all of the villages surrounding the site. This site is also of substantial local historic, ecological and social importance as we now face the possibility of losing a site of rare biodiversity, historic artefacts (including a probable Roman Road dating back to around 140CE) and an important centre of outdoor learning for local school children.This should be amazing news for Scotland, for our Green Transition and for the local area, shouldn’t it? So why have I found myself involved in a campaign opposing it?The reason is that I have deep concerns about the “business model” of the farm and deep concerns about the companies involved and their ability to follow through on their promises. We should also consider not just this project in isolation but the lesson and precedent it sets for future projects. The Scottish Government has committed to supporting the equivalent of up to 60 more solar farms of this size before 2030 - which means almost all of them will have to start their planning processes within the next year or two. This means that what happens here, now, sets the stage for essentially the entire solar PV industry in Scotland.My involvement started when we saw a notice on our community Facebook page in September about a “public” meeting to discuss the impact the proposals would have on the village. As it turned out, the public alert was made in error as the meeting was intended to be a closed one between representatives of the various community councils and community coordination groups bordering the area but the dozen or so members of the broader public (including myself and my wife Ellen) were welcomed in. The groups didn’t really know how to respond to the proposal beyond the usual “craft an objection letter” but as the discussion developed it became clear that a more organised approach was required (which was when Ellen introduced her work as Director of a community campaign design agency and offered to help not to run the campaign, but to train the groups to run their own).And so they have. Things are still early days in the campaign but we’ve discovered just how poor a deal this proposal would be not just for the local area but for Scotland and its energy transition as a whole. Just like some other major energy announcements recently, this one seems to have been specifically designed to deliver the minimum possible local benefit or community wealth building and the maximum amount of profit extraction.The company involved is a small developer based in Spain (the company itself has net assets of less than £4 million, most of it debt) that specialises in this kind of work, but has never taken on a project of this scale. We don’t know yet how much this project is likely to cost but a very rough rule-of-thumb estimate of £100 million (roughly £1mn per MW) is probably in the right ballpark. The company obviously cannot afford that level of investment itself and so have turned to a much larger investment firm, also based in Spain, for backing. That firm has recently taken on a €335 million loan from a consortium of European banks that they say will allow them to finance renewable energy projects up to 500MW. The astute will see what is coming here. €335 million might be enough to build one 500MW project but it’s not enough to build several...unless…Earlier this month, the company behind the solar farm held a public meeting of their own to discuss the plans. Thanks to their campaign training, the local groups turned out in force – and managed to gain a solid turnout from the broader resident population thanks to some sharp campaigning and leafleting of the area. We also discovered at that meeting that someone who came to the first community meeting – someone whose only engagement during the meeting was to take notes and tell us “what’s the point of campaigning when this is a done deal anyway?” – turned out to be a paid employee of the company. I was also confronted at the door by a rep who questioned my being there as the meeting was for “residents only”. Evidently their spy had googled my name enough to find out what I did for a living but not enough to know where I lived.The company reps who were there to answer questions were surprising ill-briefed for the evening (perhaps they were briefed just enough to get them through what they expected from the evening based on the usual low turnout to meetings like this) but were also surprisingly free with answers to questions that did not reflect well on them.Highlights of those conversations include:- The company admitting that there would only be around “2-3 long term jobs” associated with the project beyond the construction phase (with the implication that they wouldn’t be local jobs as the site would be monitored remotely).- When asked about worries that they could go bust and leave local companies in debt, they threatened to not use local contractors at all if that was our concern.- Admitting that the level of community benefit – already a pittance – would be even less than the village would get if they had built 100MW worth of wind energy instead of solar. There was to be no talk about direct energy payments, part-community ownership or subsidising rooftop solar panel installation in the area as it was “too complex”.- Having not yet modelled the impact of glint and glare from the site on nearby motorway traffic.- Claiming that this was the preferred site because it wasn’t “prime arable” land, without understanding that South Lanarkshire barely hosts any Grade 1-3.1 “Prime” land (most of it is in Aberdeenshire) but that this site forms some of Scotland’s best pasture for world class cattle and sheep farming.- Being less than reassuring about the safety implications of siting the batteries right next to the motorway where a fire could potentially close both one of Scotland’s major north-south road routes AND access to the site to deal with the fire.- Touting their credentials at creating “homegrown energy” but admitting that it was “fair” to critique this statement given that they were almost certainly going to import the panels from China, mostly going to use labour from outside the area to build everything and that, unless something drastic changes in the recycling sector, they’d very likely be exporting the panels to places like Bangladesh at the end of their life cycle.- Admitting that the company has never taken on a project of this size before – their largest being 75MW and that was sold off upon completion.This last point is also critical and ties in with the financial structure of their backers. This entire project is based on a debt-bubble taking place in a time when interest rates have risen precipitously from the near-zero levels seen between the 2008 Financial Crisis and the 2020 Covid pandemic. This is not a “patient finance” project where the financiers will be content to recoup their investment over the full 40 year estimated lifespan of the project. These companies have until now been based entirely on building fast and cheap then flipping the project to pay back their debts. One rep at the meeting claimed that they had now changed their strategy on this but, as I say, this would involve a company worth, in solid assets, just a few hundred thousand pounds and employing a couple of dozen people now being responsible for the largest solar farm in the UK for the next 40 years.We must ensure that Scotland’s Green Transition works for All of Us. Right now, from the point of view of the village I have lived in my entire life, it looks like it’s mostly going to work for Everyone Else But Us.This is simply not good enough. Scotland’s Green Transition cannot be based on a debt-fuelled speculative asset flip designed to make a profit for “foreign direct investors” without giving anything back to the community. I have no doubt that if this project is successfully challenged (final approval has already been countermanded from the Local Authority by the Scottish Government) then the company will simply shop around for the next farmer to accept a retirement fund from them. This is the chance to set the standard and do things right and given that the constituency MSP for this area is also the Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Just Transition – there’s the opportunity here to create international headlines for pushing forward not just “Net Zero” but a true Green New Deal.The First Minister has already committed to more public ownership of offshore energy. It’s time to do it for onshore energy as well. Our villages should have a direct community ownership stake granted to us as condition of approval. Alternatively, for the cost of only 10% more than they’re planning to spend on the project, they could kit out every single rooftop in the villages with as much solar as they can take – in fact, I’m increasingly leaning on the principle that solar PV shouldn’t be mounted on the ground UNTIL every local rooftop is covered (Solar Thermal is different, but that’s a topic for another time). For those houses that already have solar installed, pay them back retrospectively so they don’t lose out simply because they moved early with their own money. Let’s have much higher levels of democratic control over how the community funding is used in the area – existing funds are criminally under subscribed due to restrictions on how the funding can be used (a classic example is that you are able to apply for “capital funding” to build a community centre but not allowed to apply for “revenue funding” to keep it open) and a lack of democratic infrastructure to ensure that those who could use the funding are able to apply for it.Finally, can we please, please start actually supporting the Scottish economy with our energy transition? A couple of construction jobs for a few months is not good enough when the developers or eventual owners stand to extract extraordinary profits from the Scottish economy and our energy bills over the next 40 years. Relying on “foreign direct investment” and not doing basic checks to ensure that the companies involved have any kind of successful track record of sustainable development and community wealth building is just about the worst way to build any economy yet seems to the be only game in town here. I wonder about that statement from the company’s spy that this project was a “done deal”. Did she know something we don’t about discussions with the Government or Local Authority about this project and the possibility of it being approved despite or in spite of local objections? If this deal is being backed by government collusion and attempts to intimidate the community into compliance, then those bringing it are going to find very quickly that they might have wanted to check who lived next door before picking this fight. We’ve fought much bigger companies here before, and won.