Suffolk County Council, a Conservative-led local authority in Southeast England, has taken preliminary steps towards challenging the approval of the proposed Sunnica solar farm by the new UK government.
The council said on August 7 that it had sent a pre-action protocol letter to UK Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband as the first step in potential judicial review proceedings against the Sunnica project. The local authority is considering judicial review proceedings in a bid to secure funding for work that it says it would have to do as a result of the project going ahead.
Miliband granted approval to Sunnica – along with two other solar projects at Mallard Pass and Gate Burton – in mid-July, a week after the Labour Party won the general election and took office.
The approvals were in line with Labour’s target of zero-carbon electricity by 2030, with Miliband describing solar power as “crucial” to achieving net zero emissions. The approvals also aligned with Labour plans to expedite decisions on infrastructure projects that had been delayed, including major renewable energy projects.
However, those approvals have also received pushback, including from Suffolk County Council, which said it believed that “in his haste to approve the application in just a matter of days, the Secretary of State ignored the council’s funding arguments”.
The council said in an August 7 announcement that as a result, Sunnica would only have to pay a “minimal amount to cover costs that will be forced upon the council”.
It added that this comes at a time when local authorities are struggling with the allocation of limited financial resources.
Legal action
Suffolk County Council’s Deputy Cabinet Member for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, Councillor Richard Rout, stated that it would have been impossible for Miliband to fully review the Sunnica application in the time he had taken to approve the project.
“One of the crucial things he has ignored is the insufficient amount that Sunnica has proposed to reimburse local councils for dealing with conditions attached to the application,” Rout said. “This is an embarrassing, clumsy and entirely avoidable error by the Secretary of State. This is why we are taking legal action.”
The council said that when permission is granted for a nationally significant infrastructure project to proceed, it is on the condition that the developer follows the requirements laid out in the Development Consent Order.
This is monitored by the relevant local authority, and signed off when the requirements of various stages of the project are met, allowing the scheme to move onto the next stage of its construction.
The council added that this “creates much additional work for the council to do, and so funding for the council must be provided by the developer in the form of application fees”.
The 50MW Sunnica solar farm entails the installation of solar photovoltaic generating panels and a battery energy storage system (BESS) across three sites in East Cambridgeshire and West Suffolk. It also involves infrastructure for connection to the national grid, including an extension to the Burwell National Grid Substation.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has not commented on the potential challenge, as this is a live planning case.
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