The problems behind a £34m taxpayer-funded solar farm

Stretching across farmland in rural Cambridgeshire, North Angle Solar Farm was supposed to provide a green alternative to oil and gas and bring in millions to the county council to fund local services. But beset by years of delays, the £34m project is so far making less money than it was hoped, while its community path ends abruptly in a field and is choked in weeds. Now an internal report, obtained by the BBC, lays bare some of the failures behind the scheme.

Take a long, windy walk through the Fens it is difficult to miss North Angle Solar Farm amidst the flat lands, nestled between the east Cambridgeshire settlements of Soham and Wicken.

Through an unlocked gate, David Woricker, the chair of Soham Town Council, walks into the community orchard built by Cambridgeshire County Council alongside the solar farm, examining the current state of the trees.

He is concerned the trees "aren't being cared for properly and therefore aren't going to survive and thrive".

"What we don't want to see is an attempt at planting some trees and then letting that fall away and it becoming wasteland when it could be a massive asset for both the communities of Soham and Wicken," Woricker says.

A few hundred metres away down a newly-built path that stops short is North Angle Solar Farm, spread across 188 acres (76 hectares) and reportedly the largest solar farm in the county, it aims to provide electricity for 12,000 homes.

It was built by the county council after it had success with a smaller-scale Triangle Solar Farm in Soham.

With budgets ever tightening, the authority hoped North Angle would generate a revenue of £62m over 30 years, starting from the 2021-22 financial year.

The farm has been operating since November 2024, and a spokesperson for the Liberal Democrat-run council said: "This income contributes to our overall budget, supporting the delivery of essential local services including adult social care."

Woricker, a former Green Party candidate who runs the nearby South Angle Farm but was speaking to the BBC in his capacity as chair of the town council, said the council was told the money generated would go towards services and reducing council tax bills.

But the BBC has now obtained an internal county council report that gives an insight into the problems at North Angle Solar Farm.

The project received planning permission in 2020 and it was estimated to take between six and nine months to build.

Construction began in September 2021 and the project was finished in November 2024, Cambridgeshire County Council said.

It was not the only major energy project the authority was embarking upon around this time - another was a heat network scheme trying to help the rural oil-dependent village of Swaffham Prior eight miles (12.8km) from Soham become more green.

The report detailed a desire for a private underground cable to connect the two projects together, providing energy from North Angle Solar Farm to the heat network.

But the review said: "There is no evidence that the decision to develop a private cable was subject to a full risk assessment, nor challenged by an appropriate level of management."

It called this "a significant governance failure" and added the cable contributed to the costs of building the solar farm rise from £24.4m to £34.1m.

The BBC understands the council had to pay each landowner between North Angle and Swaffham Prior to put in the cable.

Other concerns highlighted in the report included that there was no project risk register - which is designed to track possible issues - until December 2022, "after delays and risks had been realised, so there was a failure to manage and monitor risks in line with the internal policy, before they could be realised".

The review also said there was "no evidence to suggest that best practice to avoid overstating benefits and understating costs (optimism bias) was followed".

To the contrary, it said the case for the solar farm should have increased costs and delayed or decreased benefits.

The council has made £2.1m from the project so far, which according to its own documents is less than it thought it would.

The national grid was built to deliver power generated by coal and gas plants near the country's major cities and towns, and it does not always have sufficient capacity in the cables that carry electricity around the country to get the new renewable electricity generated from rural areas.

These solar farms do get compensation payments, known as curtailment, but recent county council papers said there was a £1.41m "income loss" in 2025-26 from North Angle Solar Farm.

"This is mainly due to curtailment from the electricity network operator being much more significant than anticipated, as the network doesn't have the capacity to absorb all the generation during peak hours," the papers said.

The council said it had not revised it forecast about how much money the project would make "as it is too early in the life of the project to do so".

Mark Goldsack, a Conservative councillor for Soham North and Isleham on Cambridgeshire County Council, believed the project "was a good idea".

"However, as highlighted in the report, governance and ownership of the project, like the impact of construction traffic on local residents, was poorly controlled.

"Procrastination is a sin but turning a blind eye and leaving officers to hold the fort is weak leadership resulting in the reported poor bias of optimism to the positive outcomes and seriously lacking governance."

A spokesperson for the council said: "It's important to emphasise that this project is a 30-year investment, and the site has only been operating for just over a year.

"Like all renewable energy schemes, performance will vary over time, but we continue to monitor output closely and work proactively with UK Power Networks (UKPN) and our operations and maintenance contractor to optimise performance.

"UKPN uses flexible grid connections to help manage the electricity network, avoiding oversupply at times of low demand. This means that at certain points in the year UKPN can temporarily limit how much power is exported to the grid. This is a common and established part of how distributed renewable energy generators are managed nationally, and does not change the long-term, 30-year business case for the solar farm."

The council said the project's community path "has been delivered" and would be formally opened this summer and that any trees that die in the community orchard would be replaced.

But what of future projects like this?

The county council was granted planning permission for a smaller-scale solar farm to the south of Peterborough in January 2021, but added "the timing for the delivery of this is not yet confirmed".

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