Planning permission for a solar farm on the site of a former Second World War airfield has been granted by Kettering Borough Council at a planning committee meeting.
Pegasus Group, on behalf of Elgin Energy, secured permission for the scheme on land at Brigstock Road, Grafton Underwood which is set to provide enough renewable electricity for 11,400 homes in the Kettering district.
Isobel Hollands, Associate Environmental Planner from Pegasus Group’s Cirencester officer, said: “We are extremely pleased that this 38MW ground mounted solar scheme has been approved. Our experienced team carried out a great deal of collaborative work with Kettering Council’s planning officers in order to put together this well-considered plan.
“We have been working on the project since late 2018, with the application submitted in 2019, and it has utilised a full suite of Pegasus Group services including Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Landscape and Visual Assessment, Heritage Assessment, planting design, public consultation and Planning.
“Once submitted, we also took on the role of planning agent, working on an iterative design that took on board all the comments from the parish council and statutory consultees in order to ensure we had an acceptable proposal.”
The 68-hectare site of the new solar farm is on land to the north-west of Grafton Underwood. Predominantly in agricultural use, it was once an RAF base (RAF Grafton Underwood) and was later used by the US Air Force.
Construction is scheduled to take four months and it will have a 30-year life span. Permission was granted subject to conditions, including that no construction is undertaken outside of the weekday hours of 8am to 6pm and Sundays from 8.30am to 1.30pm and that a construction traffic management plan in place before work starts.
For more information about this project or about any of Pegasus Group services, please contact us.