solar PV

The Government is planning a massive expansion of solar farms across Britain, despite being warned the electricity system will struggle to cope with the increase in power.

Greg Barker, the energy and climate change minister, has disclosed that it is his “ambition” for 20GW of energy to be produced by solar panels in 2020 - effectively a ten fold increase in the number of solar farms currently built or being planned.

That level of solar power would amount to panels, many up to ten feet tall, covering a total area of land equivalent to more than 100 times the size of London’s Olympic park.

Ministers have been warned that such a steep increase in power could overload Britain’s electricity system.

The National Grid, the body responsible for the transmission of electricity across Britain, told Mr Barker’s Department of Energy and Climate Change last year that building more than 10GW of solar panels would make controlling the grid “significantly more challenging in its current form”.

The warning suggests that solar farms will, like wind farms, have to be paid not to produce electricity.