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PROJECTS
Langford Solar Farm, Mid Devon
Project: Solar farm — 49.9MW renewable energy
Location: Langford, Mid Devon
Client: JBM Solar
Services: Flood Risk
Value: £40m
What it was trying to achieve
A proposed solar farm on 150 acres of agricultural land in Mid Devon, in fields either side of the River Weaver, was designed to generate 49.9MW of renewable energy, sufficient to power approximately 10,000 local households. The scheme supported the UK’s binding commitment to reduce CO2 emissions. The site was designated Flood Zone 3 by national flood mapping, and Mid Devon Council’s policy treated all Flood Zone 3 land as the functional floodplain unless the designation could be challenged with evidence. That was the obstacle the planning case had to overcome.
What made it complex
Flood Zone 3b policy restricts appropriate development to a defined list of uses: critical roads, power stations, sewage works, wind turbines. Solar farms were not on that list. Any development in the functional floodplain was required to pass an exception test, including demonstrating that sustainability benefits outweighed the flood risk. The Environment Agency had objected. The local authority had indicated refusal was likely. The specific difficulty was that no policy or guidance existed defining how the exception test should be applied to solar panels. The argument had to be made without a template.
What it produced
The Environment Agency withdrew its objection in December 2020. The following month, the Environment Agency announced that solar farms should be included on the essential infrastructure list. In January 2021, the government released a consultation document to make that national policy. The hydraulic argument developed for this site contributed to the policy position that now applies to solar development in flood zones.
How we thought about it
We read the fingerprint of what the flood zone designation was actually protecting. The policy purpose of Flood Zone 3b is to preserve the capacity of the floodplain to store and convey flood water. The question we asked was not whether the site could be argued out of its designation, but whether solar panels specifically impaired that function. We argued that wind turbines, already on the permitted list, should be treated as a proxy for solar panels in a functional floodplain context. The argument had been attempted elsewhere without success. We built the hydraulic evidence to demonstrate that panels installed across the site would not impair the floodplain’s storage or conveyance function, and negotiated the areas where panels should be excluded based on that evidence.
Newsteer Real Estate Advisors
Director