Ground-mounted Solar Panels: Alternatives

Lincoln Jopp Excerpts

Tuesday 14th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of alternatives to ground mounted solar panels.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. I sensed the people coming into the Chamber in the last couple of minutes and I felt a quickening. It was like energy coming together, which is completely appropriate given what we are here to debate: alternatives to land-based solar panels.

The context in which I wish to couch this debate is twofold. One aspect is local and one slightly more geostrategic. People say that in politics, where you sit defines where you stand. Hon. Members may or may not know that I am the proud Member of Parliament for Spelthorne. I sometimes feel the need to remind hon. Members that Spelthorne is not in Lincolnshire or Lancashire; it is, in fact, everything south of Heathrow airport until hon. Members get to the River Thames.

When I was elected, at the last election, to be the Member for Spelthorne, I looked at a very big map of the constituency—hon. Members will be very surprised to learn that I used to be in the Army, and there used to be a very good saying in the Army: “If you don’t know what’s going on, get a bigger map”—and I identified four enormous blocks of blue. That was half of London’s drinking water in four raised reservoirs. Being a practical man, I thought to myself, “Well, there aren’t many votes in there.” I also thought to myself that we cannot really build many homes there.

I did further research and it turns out that in 2016, on the Queen Elizabeth reservoir in a neighbouring constituency, a large technology demonstrator for floating solar was laid down, and ever since it has produced 6.3 MW of power—enough to power about 2,000 homes. That was at the time the largest one in Europe; back in 2016, we were leading. I looked into the situation further in order to see whether we were world-leading, but it turns out that we were not particularly, and that floating solar has been deployed to a greater extent in China, India, Vietnam and Israel. We will come in due course to the benefits of floating solar as an alternative to land-based systems.

I want now to return to the more national context. Frequently, we are led to believe that alternative sources of energy can be something of a zero-sum game—when someone takes one step forward, someone else has to take one step backwards. As I am sure we will hear, in large parts of the United Kingdom there are proposed large, land-based solar farms, frequently on very good agricultural land, so the zero-sum game between food security and energy security needs unpicking.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on bringing forward a debate on this massive issue. Is he aware that there are roughly 600,000 acres of unused, south-facing industrial rooftops in the United Kingdom that could be utilised before we industrialise the countryside? The Government must look at those in order to utilise already built heritage and leave our countryside as it is to produce the food that we need.

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[Lincoln Jopp]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point. I hope other Members will come forward with their own preferred alternatives to land-based systems, because there are others.

[Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a characteristically brilliant speech—the jokes get better each time we hear them. Does he agree that there are other types of provision? My area of interest is space-based solar power provision, which could provide the same sorts of solutions without taking up precious agricultural land.

[Lincoln Jopp]

As the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, my hon. Friend is only too well placed to talk about that. As his Whip, I can only say that his jokes get better too.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

On the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) made, I can say that when I was the Minister for Space, I strongly supported space solar, which is a genuinely exciting British breakthrough.

My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) is making a really important point about food security. As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on science and technology in agriculture, I know that we are hugely vulnerable to the geopolitics of the strait of Hormuz and global supply chains more broadly, so we need to do more to support UK agricultural production. In my patch, we have an 8,000-acre solar farm on farmland, which will see good, productive land taken out. This Friday, I am chairing the Central Norfolk Solar Factory Farm Alliance. We are very keen to see solar on reservoirs, motorways, council buildings—on any surfaces we can—but not on good farmland.

[Lincoln Jopp]

And there we see the battle. Without wishing to get into other controversial areas, it is a little like proposals to build on green belt. If everything else were built on first and we protected the green belt, we would be a richer country.

[Samantha Niblett (South Derbyshire) (Lab)]

South Derbyshire has two grid connections and gets a plethora of applications for solar and battery energy storage systems—it is the bane of my life. I am passionate about moving to renewables. I have just got an electric car, and it is helping me keep my energy costs down for the journeys that I need to make, particularly in the light of what is happening with Iran.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for securing this debate on alternatives, but does he agree that it is not quite as straightforward as we think? We need to do this quite speedily. People assume that putting solar panels on industrial sites is easy, but we still need to be able to connect them to the grid, which is being upgraded in my neck of the woods. Does he agree that, much as we desperately want alternatives, there is not a sliver bullet to get us there?

[Lincoln Jopp]

The hon. Lady makes a really important point. One of the massive delays in deploying solar power is the requirement to achieve planning permission, and I am so pleased that she has brought that up. One of the beauties of floating solar is that if the owner of the reservoir or former quarry will use the electricity themselves, there is no requirement for planning permission. In terms of speed to deployment, return on investment and speed to profit, this is to a certain extent an answer to a maiden’s prayer.

We have not yet added in the third element of this battle between food security and energy security: water security. I believe in climate change. I am more sceptical about carbon neutrality within a certain arbitrary timeline, but the fact is that evaporation is a massive issue as the world warms up. One of the stunning and much less vaunted benefits of floating solar is that it reduces evaporation by 70%. Australia is very expensively covering reservoirs in anti-evaporation covers, but those could be floating solar panels.

I can sense the mood of the Chamber—hon. Members are very keen for me to list the other benefits, so I will do just that. The first, which we have talked about, is that floating solar comes with none of the opportunity costs of putting solar panels on grade A agricultural land, so we can move the debate on from whether we have to choose between energy security and food security.

Secondly, because of the effect on evaporation, floating solar also moves the debate on from the need for water security and energy security. Another stunning benefit is that it is twice as efficient as land-based systems. We would need only half the amount of floating solar as we would need solar covering Lincolnshire or Suffolk agricultural land. Hon. Members who remember their O-level physics will know that the evaporative effect on the underside of the floating solar panel makes it self-cooling, whereas land-based and roof-based systems and those in railway sidings simply get hotter through the working day and become less efficient.

“What about the water in these reservoirs? Surely, Lincoln, this can’t be as good as it sounds?” Well, it gets better, especially if the reservoir is to be used for drinking water further downstream. Denuded of heat and light, those things that grow in reservoirs that subsequently have to be filtered out, very expensively, by the water companies cannot grow. It is win-win-win all round.

Let us leave 2016, when we were Europe’s leaders, and fast-forward to last year. If ever there was a way to motivate Members of the House of Commons, it is to suggest that the French are beating us at something. Bear in mind the 6.3 MW—enough to power 2,000 homes—on the Queen Elizabeth reservoir. Last year, a plant on a disused quarry in Perthes, France became fully operational. It generates 75 MW.

I visited a former dock in Barrow-in-Furness where a 45 MW site is planned. It has to go through planning because BAE Systems will take the electricity. I would relax the permitted development right to include third-party use of the electricity, so that we can realise the benefits and improve the business case of floating solar to entertain the sort of investment it would need. I think there are 570 reservoirs in this country, and there is floating solar on one—the Queen Elizabeth. Ten further projects are planned. We also have innumerable former quarries and unused ports such as at Barrow. The opportunity is huge; we are talking terawatts. If it is realised, floating solar could generate 1% of UK baseload.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) mentioned space. Clearly, that would be phenomenal. Dare I say that it behoves the Government to look at this in a more strategic way than hitherto? They published their long-awaited solar road map. It has about 94 pages, and about half a page and a photo are dedicated to floating solar, which they describe as a “nascent” technology. I hope that I have shown that it is not nascent at all; it has been with us for quite some time.

Last August I stood on top of the Golan heights, looking down towards Syria, and saw two enormous reservoirs that were almost completely covered with floating solar panels. We should look to hotter and more arid countries for our sense of where we should take our innovation and technology. My plea to the House and the Government is this: look again at the potential for floating solar. When it comes to energy security, food security and water security, it provides a non-ideological, highly practical solution—a NIHPS—without papering over the beautiful parts of England.

By the way, all the reservoirs in my constituency are raised, so this solution comes with none of the visual vandalism of our country being carpeted in solar panels, to which people object so much. The tops of those reservoirs can be seen only by people taking off from or landing at Heathrow. The hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Samantha Niblett) is quite right: nothing is as simple or as perfect as it might first sound. I do not envy her having two grid plug-in points—she will be one of the most popular Members of Parliament going. But if we can, we must examine floating solar in greater detail, because it could, to a certain extent, produce a valuable alternative diversification of our energy supply in a world that is becoming ever more dangerous and insecure.

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[Lincoln Jopp]

I am grateful to all hon. Members who have made such powerful contributions. I love the image of the Minister under his bed clothes with a torch reading the Hansard report of my Adjournment debate.

I can see the turning point where floating solar went from a nascent technology to one that the Minister wants to drive further and faster. He made a crucial point about how it is all very well to will the ends, but we need to will the ways and means, and not say, “Not in my back yard”. Floating solar is exactly my way of saying to the farmers in Lincolnshire and hon. Members from great agricultural land, “Yes, in my back yard. In fact, on half of London’s drinking water in the four raised reservoirs in Spelthorne, and in across other raised reservoirs across the country.” We can unpick this constant battle between food, water and energy security, and I am grateful to the House for giving me the opportunity to highlight that.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Order.