Electricity from Renewable Sources

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:57 pm on 8 February 2023.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 1:57, 8 February 2023

Thank you, Natasha. Obviously, I won't comment on individual projects because I'm the planning Minister as well, so I'll make some general remarks about that.

Quite clearly, we do want solar to come forward, alongside a raft of other things in the renewable energy market. What we want is to get as many different outcomes from energy projects as possible. So, we're particularly interested in solar that doesn't take up good agricultural land, solar that's placed on land that doesn't have high-grade agriculture. We are hoping that the solar farms will take into account potential for co-located biodiversity or tree planting. There are some excellent examples around Wales. The panels aren't necessarily fixed—they can be raised from the ground, they can be at different angels, they can even move and all the rest of it. So, in general, we're trying to encourage as much solar as possible in the right place. We're trying to discourage it from the wrong place, as we do with all other energy projects as well, and we're asking the developers to tell us a whole range of things as they bring the schemes forward, including how much energy they'll generate, obviously, how it would connect into the grid, or whether it's a closed-loop system.

There's a great one down in, I think, my colleague Rebecca Evans's constituency, or I might be wrong, as it might be in my colleague Mike Hedges’s constituency, but it powers Morriston Hospital, and that's a closed-loop system. Is it yours?