Heated debate: why Churchill’s birthplace lies at the heart of UK solar battle

Botley West solar farm, as the project is called, would exist in a part of Oxfordshire charged with history. It would stand near the grounds of “Britain’s greatest palace” (as the official website puts it), the golden-stone pile of Blenheim, built with the help of funds and land given by Queen Anne to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, in 1704. Its baroque John Vanbrugh architecture and Capability Brown park have made it, since 1987, a Unesco world heritage site. Winston Churchill was born in the palace and is buried in the nearby church of Bladon.

The proposed farm is the biggest, most-charged, battle in a national struggle. On one hand there is Britain’s urgent need for renewable energy, on the other the fear that swaths of countryside will disappear beneath rectangles of dark silicon. “The national policy position assumes these things should happen,” says the planning barrister Hashi Mohamed, who is acting on behalf of objectors to the scheme. But this is not to say that solar facilities should be built in any circumstances. With Botley West, the question is not only one of planning considerations, but also the way it is funded – and for whose benefit it is being built.

The project comes with allegations of opaque funding, conflicts of interest and the suspicion that it is as much about enriching the current Duke of Marlborough and his relatives as it is about saving the planet. A fight that might be characterised as the nimbies versus progressives might equally be seen as the people versus the posh. The proposal is to install more than 2 million solar panels on 880 hectares in three zones within an area up to 11 miles long and five miles wide. It would generate 840 megawatts, enough to power 330,000 homes. The land is on the Blenheim estate, part of Queen Anne’s original gift, and is owned by three trusts on behalf of the Spencer-Churchills, to use the family name of the Duke of Marlborough.

In 2023 the trusts entered into an option agreement with SolarFive, a company set up by PVDP, which would pay the estate an annual rent estimated to be £1,000 an acre – perhaps £2m – in return for allowing the solar farm to be built on the land. About 80% would go to the family, the rest to the charity that takes care of the palace and park.

First, though, the project needs to be approved by Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy and net zero, following an examination – currently in progress – and a recommendation by the Planning Inspectorate, a national government agency. Miliband, as he did with the Sunnica solar farm near Newmarket, Suffolk, can overrule the inspectorate.

The solar farm project, says Dominic Hare, the chief executive officer of Blenheim Palace and the Blenheim estate, is about serving both future generations and the financial interests of the estate. “At the end of the day, Blenheim is essentially a set of businesses, and if I want to use capital for something, then I have to find a business case.” The estate asked, he says, “if we were to use every last damn acre of the place to try and fight climate change, what is the most effective thing that you can do?” The answer was a solar farm. The gentle climate and densely populated landscape of Oxfordshire are not suited to wind turbines, but there is the capacity for a nearby connection to the National Grid.

Hare says great care has been taken to conceal the panels behind hedges. Their installation, he says, will allow exhausted agricultural land to lie fallow and regenerate; biodiversity will flourish and sheep will be able to graze, albeit not in the same places. The estate has responded to criticism by removing land around Bladon and other locations, amounting to about 8% of the original total, from plans. The farm will pay £440,000 a year in community benefits (not enough, say objectors). It will also be “temporary”, although its projected life of up to 42 years will see out many of the residents who will be affected.

The Stop Botley West campaigners argue that the proposals are too big, too overwhelming. “We recognise that the country needs renewable energy,” says Rosemary Lewis, a former teacher. “We’re not rabid climate deniers and it’s perfectly sensible to put solar panels on roofs.” They would welcome more facilities like the nearby 4.5 megawatt community energy facility at Charlbury.

But they fear that the area where they live will become a giant energy facility interspersed with homes and trees, their walks across open fields hemmed in by the fences and hedges that will surround the fields of panels. “It would completely change the experience,” says Mohamed. “That is an amenity value that you can’t put a price on.”

The solar farm will, say objectors, damage the setting of the palace and its park. Although the panels will not be visible from either, Blenheim Palace’s own management plan for the world heritage site speaks of the general importance of the land surrounding them both. Published in 2017, it declares that the site’s “elements of outstanding natural value” include “the character of the setting as traditional English countryside dotted with picturesque villages”.

These would be impacted by the solar farm, as would other listed buildings, including a Grade I church, conservation areas, ancient woodland, archaeological sites and the Oxford green belt.

Behind these local debates lies the urgency of Britain’s energy needs, made pressing by the dilatoriness of previous governments, including David Cameron’s decision in 2014 effectively to ban onshore wind farms. According to Frank Hodgson, an analyst at the independent clean energy thinktank Regen, Britain is “going to need the whole lot” – solar and wind in particular, as well as such things as more interconnected networks.

Under its clean power 2030 action plan, the government aims to increase solar energy capacity from 16.6 gigawatts in 2024 to between 45 and 47 in 2030. This, says Hodgson, is a “massive amount”, which cannot all be achieved by solar panels on roofs and car parks, as opponents of rural solar farms would like. These numbers help to explain Miliband’s enthusiasm for renewable energy, but the question is whether it should be achieved at any cost.

In a series of articles dating from 2023, Private Eye has raised questions about Photovolt and its links to Russian money. The German version of the company is owned by the Cyprus firm Cransseta Investments Ltd, whose sole shareholder is Yulia Lehzen, a Russian-Cypriot who, with the German citizen Peter Gerstmann, also co-owns Photovolt UK and SolarFive. Her late husband, Dmitry Glukhov, was a Russian businessman who was accused of bank fraud centred on a gold mine which, according to a New York court filing, produced little or no gold. Lehzen and her companies were alleged to have been used to “siphon off” the money. A Photovolt spokesperson said that the case against Glukhov had been dismissed by a Russian court in December 2023 and “the matter was now closed”.

Photovolt’s structures are complex: for example, a solar facility in Osaki, Japan, was owned by a Belize-registered company called Kamisol, which in turn was owned by another offshore company, with Gerstmann and Glukhov as beneficial owners. Merton College Oxford, some of whose land was included in the project, withdrew after Private Eye’s articles. It has failed to respond to requests to explain why it did this.

The independent government panel currently scrutinising the planning merits of the project has raised doubts about its financing: “PVDP at the end of 2022 indicated a retained profit of just over £1m. The project cost is purported to be circa £820m … It appears that there is a significant absence of funds.” How, the examiner wants to know, “does the company explain the disparity and where is significant investment to come from?” PVDP says that funds will come from the sale of its Japanese projects, but apart from £11m from Cransseta, it is unclear how these will materialise.

PVDP denies any impropriety in its funding or that there is anything wrong with the structure of multiple companies registered in many locations. That it has engaged with “blue-chip investors and advisers”, such as Goldman Sachs and Kyocera, shows, it says, that such suggestions are “clearly not correct”. There is, it says, no obligation under the planning process “to have all construction funds in place prior to consent being granted. Once consent is granted, PVDP will have an investable asset that financing can be raised against.”

Meanwhile, the Spencer-Churchills and the Blenheim estate are pursuing ambitious business plans financed with the help of large borrowings. The estate had debts of approximately £191m in March 2025, up from £60m in 2014, which was when the previous duke died.

It has what the Stop Botley West objectors call a “long history of trying to monetise the landscape”, for example by building 500 homes on its land, with another 620 in the pipeline. “Since 2014,” they add, “this focus has become much more aggressive as their debt commitments have soared.”

The estate’s conversion to the cause of solar energy seems to have come late. Its current enthusiasm is a remarkable reversal of its own 2017 world heritage site management report, which listed solar farms as the sort of “industrial development” that should not happen on its land. Blenheim also chose not to put solar panels on the houses it built, saying they would be “problematic in terms of achieving a good appearance from the public realm”, said the organisation which now proposes covering 880 hectares with them.

The objectors also question the relationship between the Blenheim Palace Heritage Foundation charity and the several businesses that seek to make a profit on the estate. Several individuals, including Hare and the current duke’s half-brother, Edward Spencer-Churchill, are common to the boards and staff of both for-profit and not-for-profit organisations, and the charity has loaned £16m to the business. The objectors do not believe any of this activity is illegal or fraudulent but, in relation to the solar farm, the closeness of the estate and the foundation raises the question of whether the latter is able to take an independent position – had the farm been proposed by a completely separate landowner, one might have expected its trustees to be vocal on the subject. “You wouldn’t expect the trustees of Stonehenge,” I’m told, “to stay quiet if thousands of acres of panels were proposed around it.”

On the interconnection of Blenheim’s charity and business arms, Hare says that “landed estates tend to be slightly complex; we’re far from being unique in this world”, while the size of their debt, in relation to their assets, is not excessive: “We are not considered by anyone to be financially fragile in any sense.” The loan from the charity to the business was, he argues, a “good business proposition” for both sides. “It was a lovely theory of one or two locals that we would do this deal because we were financially desperate, but nothing could be further from the truth.”

But it’s hard to believe that this is the best way of meeting Britain’s energy needs. There is genuine concern that owing to a lack of foresight and courage by previous governments, and a failure to predict such things as demand on the grid, a kind of desperation has arisen.

There is immense pressure to build a project that is, in my view, damaging to the lives of local residents and to the visual landscape which, thanks to a centuries-ago royal gift, happens to be in the ­possession of a ­single landowner.

With Botley West, it seems that there has been little attempt to consider whether this is the best location, or to find ways in which less dense, more widely spread panels might be integrated with the Oxfordshire countryside.

This, though, is the kind of planning that many believe Britain has largely forgotten how to do.

Photograph by Brian Raisbeck/Getty Images