Cornwall has a love-hate relationship with renewable energy. Whilst politicians of most of the mainstream parties, and most independent councillors, profess to support the need to reduce carbon emissions and to promote the generation of renewable energy, when it comes to specific projects there always seem to be reasons why the particular project is “not the right solution” or “not in the right place” etc. - the usual Nimby approach to planning.
In the early 2010s, many proposals for wind turbines were put forward in planning applications to Cornwall Council and nearly every application generated many objections from members of the public, parish councils and some Cornwall Councillors. Planning committees sometimes approved applications, sometimes refused them. For several years up until the mid 2010s, most refusals were overturned on appeal by government planning inspectors. But, increasingly, Conservative MPs, pandering to the nimby vote, lobbied the government to put a stop to wind turbines. In June 2015, Conservative Secretary of State Greg Clark issued a ministerial statement that changed the planning rules by decreeing that it only needed some local objections to any wind turbine proposal for the application to be automatically refused. As a result, virtually no new wind farms were approved for several years. (The Labour government has now rescinded that Ministerial statement and made it easier for planning permission to be given to wind projects again.)
Meanwhile, the cost of manufacturing solar panels was plummeting and, by the late 2010s, renewable energy developers turned to putting forward proposals for large scale solar farms. Initially, opposition to these was more muted than the opposition to wind turbines. Solar panels are generally less visible in the countryside than turbines. Also, with large scale solar, the economics can make it possible to achieve a financial return on the projects without any of the subsidies that were previously given to renewables through the renewables obligation certificates or the feed-in tariffs, all of which have now ceased. As the scale of proposals increased so that a single proposed scheme could cover 50 or more acres, opposition to these schemes has increased. Recent proposals for large solar farms in Cornwall have been refused planning permission by the Council’s Strategic Planning Committee, although it is likely that most of these refusals will be overturned on appeal by government planning inspectors.
What is often overlooked about these renewable energy projects is that, not only do they all make significant contributions to reducing carbon emissions in the electricity generation sector, but they also provide a bit of much needed income to the local council in the form of the business rates that they pay. As of the financial year 2025/26, Cornwall Council will be receiving from all the renewable energy installations in the county about £5.5 million in business rates, comprising about £3 million from all the wind turbines and £2.5 million from the solar installations. All these figures are contained within the Council’s publicly accessible spreadsheet (see Cornwall Council webpage, click on the link on that page to the data) that lists every business rates paying entity. I have extracted the information for renewables and summarised them in two downloadable pdf documents, windfarm business rates and solar farm business rates.