Agricultural Land Classes of Solar Installations in England
The land-take analysis was extended to investigate the Agricultural Land Classification (ALC), Grades 1 to 5, used by ground-mounted solar installations in England. Best and Most Versatile (BMV) land for agriculture falls in ALC grades 1 to 3a inclusive. Grades 3b to 5 inclusive are of poorer quality land, although Grade 3b land can be equally productive as BMV land for cereal crops. Current ALC maps do not distinguish Grades 3a and 3b land, which is hence treated simply as ‘Grade 3’.
For the country as a whole, the proportions of ALC Grades 1 to 5 are 2.72%, 14.2%, 48.3%, 14.1% and 8.4% respectively.
For ground-mounted solar installations across England, the proportions of ALC Grades 1 to 5 are 2.8%, 16.6%, 64.5%, 11.2% and 0.5% respectively.
For unequivocal Best and Most Versatile (BMV) land (Grades 1 and 2) the percentages across the whole country or just within solar installations are 16.9% and 19.4% respectively. Solar installations seem disproportionately aimed at BMV land.
For unequivocal non-BMV land (Grades 4 and 5) the percentages across the whole country or just within solar installations are 22.5% and 11.6% respectively. Solar installations seem disproportionately to be avoiding non-BMV land, i.e. they are avoiding the land they are ‘recommended’ to be using.
There is a much higher proportion of solar on ALC Grade 3 land than the proportion of this land across the nation as a whole (64.5% vs 48.3% respectively). It seems that developers are ignoring recommendations on siting solar installations away from productive agricultural land. If anything, they appear to prefer BMV to non-BMV land for development.
Although the total amount of land currently used by ground-mounted solar is a fraction of the total available (c. 0.46%), the Government’s aim to triple solar power to 50GW by 2030 (previously 70GW by 2050) means that much more land will be needed in the future for this renewable energy source.
Unless the present recommendations are much more actively enforced, or unless new legislation is introduced to protect productive land (e.g. including more land in the BMV category) we will continue to see encroachment of solar on land that is best used for growing food. A developing food crisis will not be averted by losing yet more land to solar. Click on the image (right) to read the full Report
Agricultural Land Classes of Solar Installations by Region
The above analysis was extended to investigate Agricultural Land Classes in the nine English Regions and the land-take in them by ground-mounted solar. The results are shown below. The percentages of the different ALC grades in each region are shown by the green histograms. The percentages of the different ALC grades in the solar installations in that region are shown in yellow/gold (left-hand vertical axis in both cases). Each set of histograms adds up to 100%.
The percentage of each land class occupied by solar is shown by the thin black line (right-hand vertical axis), with the overall figure shown against the ‘Total’ label on the horizontal axis.
In all regions, solar installations are using proportionately more ALC Grade 3 land than is actually present (the yellow histograms are always taller than the green histograms). In all regions except one, solar installations use proportionately less of the poorest quality land (ALC Grades 4 and 5) than is actually present. In five of the nine regions, solar is using disproportionately more of the unequivocal Best and Most Versatile land (ALC Grades 1 and 2) than is actually present.
Nationwide, solar installations are ignoring recommendations to use poorer quality farmland (especially the poorest quality Grade 5 land), and are instead using disproportionately more good quality farmland. This is not for lack of poor quality land in each region; the thin black lines show that solar is taking only a small percentage of this sort of land. Only 16.9% of all the land in England is unequivocally BMV land (ALC Grades 1 and 2). To lose any of it to solar threatens national food supplies and therefore food security.
Use the left/right arrows to see the results for the different Regions, below.
(The above report and this additional analysis use only the data from the Renewable Energy Planning Database which does not yet include information from many of the large-area ground-mounted solar installations that will be considered under the NSIP regime. SolarQ has digitised most of the redline boundaries of these and will add their information to later versions of this analysis.)
East Midlands
West Midlands
Yorkshire and The Humber
North East
North West
South East
South West
England
East
London