Greg Smith

Greg Smith

Conservative — Mid Buckinghamshire

Speaking in the House of Commons on 22 October 2024

Debate

Large-scale Energy Projects and Food Security

Contribution

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention and congratulate her on squeezing her speech into it. I would argue that, yes, a balanced approach is right and important, but this goes to the nub of the argument that ground-mounted solar is actually incredibly inefficient. When we have something in scarce supply—land, in this country—we need to go for the technologies that are going to deliver. I have used these important statistics in Westminster Hall before and I will make my penultimate point with them today. We need 2,000 acres of solar panels to produce enough power for 50,000 homes on current usage; for a small modular reactor, we need the space of two football pitches and it will produce enough power for a million homes. A single wind turbine will produce enough power for 16,000 homes and probably needs only half the size of the room we are in right now. This debate is about efficiency and proper land use. It is about getting to renewable energy production, but it is also about using technology that does not destroy our countryside and that does not fundamentally take away our other core source of national security, which is food production.

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