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The Green Party and Reform UK have found rare common ground opposing plans to cover more than 5,000 acres, around a tenth of Romney Marsh, with three combined solar farms including the 500MW South Brooks project near Lydd

Romney Marsh's flat terrain, strong sun and spare grid capacity from the decommissioning Dungeness nuclear stations make it genuinely well suited to utility-scale solar. Final planning authority sits with central government, not Kent's councils, since the schemes qualify as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects.

10 August 2026 · Source: Financial Times / EnergySector

It's an odd pairing on paper, the Green Party and Reform UK standing on the same side of a planning fight, but the underlying objection is the same one that shows up in most large solar farm disputes, whatever the politics of the people raising it: a rural landscape people know well is about to look very different, and the people who'll live next to it don't get the final say. Romney Marsh is the specific site here, and the scale under discussion, more than 5,000 acres across three schemes, is roughly a tenth of the whole marsh.

The reason Romney Marsh keeps coming up for solar developers isn't accidental. It's flat, gets strong sun exposure by UK standards, and, crucially, sits next to Dungeness, where decommissioning nuclear capacity is freeing up grid connection headroom that's scarce almost everywhere else in the South East. That combination of land, light and grid access is exactly what makes a site attractive to a developer and exactly what makes local objectors describe it as the marsh being turned into what one campaign group called a power station in all but name.

The planning mechanics matter here because they cut local councils out of the final decision. Projects of this scale, the 500MW South Brooks scheme among them, qualify as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, which means they go through a Development Consent Order process with the Energy Secretary making the ultimate call rather than Kent's district or county planners. That's the structural reason Green and Reform campaigners are fighting this at the consultation-response stage rather than through a local council vote, since a council vote isn't actually where the decision gets made.

None of this changes anything for a Sandwich homeowner looking at a rooftop quote this month, a household-scale system doesn't touch this planning process at all. What's worth watching is the precedent: if South Brooks and the other Romney Marsh schemes get consent despite vocal cross-party local opposition, it signals that grid capacity and land suitability are outweighing local landscape objections at the national decision-making level, which tells you something about how much more utility-scale solar is likely to land on Kent's flatter, sunnier ground over the next decade.

Read the original: Financial Times / EnergySector. Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.

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