A huge new solar farm has been unveiled which plans to cover 900 acres of farmland in Kent, dwarfing output of UK’s current largest solar site, developers have said.
A consortium of two energy companies has announced plans to build the £400m solar farm on agricultural land at Cleve Hill, near Faversham.
Hive Energy and Wirsol Energy's proposals would be larger than London’s Hyde Park and even Central Park in New York. If plans are successful, it will be able to generate more than 350MW by the time it goes live in 2020.
They said the project will be built upon a site of "relatively low-grade" farmland, and would bring in more than £1million a year in business rates to Swale Borough and Kent County Councils.
But rural campaign group Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) said the size of the proposal makes the it environmentally unfriendly and unsuitable to the area.
Hilary Newport, director of CPRE Kent, told the BBC that development there would harm the landscape and threaten wildlife.
"If I was to think of the worst possible place to put a solar farm it would be here," she said.
"We absolutely support the principle of renewable energy, but [the panels] should be on roofs, not trashing landscapes in an astonishingly beautiful part of the Kent marshes."
The UK's biggest existing solar farm is government-owned, located at Lyneham in Wiltshire and produces 69MW.
