OPINION
Ed Miliband (Image: Getty)
The motto of my Spelthorne constituency is: ‘We face towards the sun.’ And nowhere is this truer than with our 2,000 acres of reservoirs, which contain half of London’s drinking water. You’ll have seen them if you’ve taken off or landed at Heathrow. No one lives there, and you can’t build homes on them. But 25 years in the Army taught me that if you can’t see the opportunity in any situation, look at it differently.
So I did, and discovered floating solar. It’s simple technology. You put solar panels on floats, anchor them to the bottom of the reservoir or quarry, and string cables to a transformer on the shore. From there, the power can go into the grid. There’s so much that’s good about it. Firstly, it’s real and it works. In 2016 we created Europe’s largest floating solar farm on the Queen Elizabeth II reservoir in Surrey. It has been producing 6.3 megawatts ever since – enough to power 1,800 homes.
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Most importantly, by using floating solar we could put a complete stop to ruining perfectly good farmland and Green Belt by covering it with solar panels, as Red Ed Miliband’s proposing. There’s a double benefit here because floating solar is twice as efficient as land-based systems, which overheat. Floating solar is self-cooling, so for every acre of farmland we save, we only have to put down half an acre of floating solar.
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Floating solar saves water, a precious resource. We lose vast amounts of water every year, simply through evaporation from reservoirs. Floating solar slashes that evaporation by 70pc. This technology also improves the quality of the water in the reservoir, meaning the water companies have to use fewer filterants to get it ready for our taps. That saves them money, and helps the environment too.
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The French are all over this. They’ve just opened Europe’s largest floating solar farm in a disused quarry in Perthes, south of Paris, producing a whopping 74.3 megawatts. The Germans are planning a 26 megawatt farm and, yep, China, India and Japan already have enormous floating solar farms too.
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Meanwhile, our Government is having a shocker. They published their Solar Roadmap this month, and floating solar is way back on page 72, sniffily dismissed as ‘nascent technology’. Oh, dear. Red Ed’s really got it in for our ‘green and pleasant land’, hasn’t he? So if you don’t want to see our beautiful countryside ruined by giant solar farms across our land, tell your MP that if we put floating solar on just 15pc of the total surface area of our reservoirs, we’d double the amount of solar power we produce – and not ruin an inch of our precious fertile farmland.
Leave the land to grow spuds for our dinner, hops for our beer, and beef for the Sunday roast. And after all, no one wants to watch Clarkson’s Solar Farm!