Thurcroft solar farm: Behemoth gargoyles blight the landscape

One such project is on the cards for Thurcroft, a proposal that we are told will power 20,000 homes and rid the atmosphere of some 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year. In exchange for these riches, 103 hectares of farmland will need to be sacrificed for the next 40 years.

Now, no one will disagree, and certainly not this newspaper, that it is far more agreeable to generate the power we use sustainably, from renewable sources that do not harm the environment. However, a sceptic of big-power corporations could be forgiven for asking: before this behemoth gargoyle is allowed to protrude from South Yorkshire’s greenbelt, have all other options been explored? Is it really necessary to blanket a natural habitat with unsightly heavy-duty industrial detritus?

Perhaps the 10,000 people who live in the affected ward might prefer the soar panels directly on their rooftops, with the power they generated offered to them first at a discounted rate before any excess is sold to the grid. Perhaps there are public buildings, urban opportunities, micropanel opportunities whose iterative marginal gains mount up the same sum of parts. Anything but this.