Giant Solar Farm Planned for Melton Mowbray Farmland

A Canadian energy company has submitted plans to cover 293 acres of Leicestershire farmland near Melton Mowbray with solar panels — a scheme large enough to power 25,000 homes for the next 40 years. Boralex has lodged the proposal with Melton Borough Council for a site spanning eight fields off Sawgate Road in the village of Burton Lazars, just south of the market town.

What Boralex Is Proposing Near Melton Mowbray

The 118-hectare site — roughly the size of 183 football pitches — would generate 99.9 megawatts (MW) of electricity, making it one of the largest solar proposals ever submitted to a local planning authority in England. Boralex says the facility would operate for 40 years before being dismantled and the land returned to agriculture.

The 99.9MW figure is not accidental. A recent change to government planning policy, which came into force at the end of 2025, now classifies any energy project over 100MW as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) — meaning it would bypass local councils entirely and go straight to the Secretary of State for a development consent order. By hovering just below that threshold, Boralex keeps the decision with Leicestershire councillors rather than Whitehall. It is the first application of this type — above 50MW but below the new 100MW NSIP ceiling — to be submitted to any local planning authority in the country.

Planning documents confirm that Boralex is not required to provide a full environmental impact assessment for the scheme at this stage. A comprehensive planning application is expected to follow.

Melton’s Green Energy Dilemma — and Why It’s Bigger Than It Looks

Let’s be direct about what this is: a very large company from Canada wants to plant solar panels across a very large stretch of Leicestershire farmland, and local councillors in Melton are going to have to decide whether that is a good idea. The pressure on them to say yes will be considerable. The pressure from local residents and farming communities to say no — or at least slow down — will also be real.

Both sides of this argument have a point, and that is precisely why it matters so much to get the decision right.

The case for the scheme is genuinely strong. The UK is in the middle of an energy crisis that has not really gone away. Gas prices remain volatile, energy bills continue to bite ordinary households across Leicestershire and beyond, and the country has made legal commitments to decarbonise its electricity grid. Solar power is one of the cheapest and fastest ways to generate clean electricity, and a 99.9MW plant powering 25,000 homes for four decades is not a trivial contribution. Leicestershire sits in one of the more solar-productive parts of the East Midlands. It rains here, yes — but we get more sun than the national reputation suggests.

Boralex is also not some fly-by-night operation. They are a serious independent power producer with projects across Europe and North America, and the planning framework they are working within is the one the British government deliberately redesigned at the end of 2025 to encourage exactly this kind of large-scale local solar investment.

But the concerns about losing agricultural land are not just nimbyism, and they deserve to be taken seriously. The site at Burton Lazars is working farmland. These eight fields are not brownfield wasteland — they are productive countryside in the Vale of Belvoir fringe, the kind of gently rolling Leicestershire landscape that has been farmed for centuries. Once solar panels go down for 40 years, that land is, in practice, out of food production for a generation. No amount of promises about “restoring it to agricultural use” changes the lived reality for local farming families in the meantime.

There is also a cumulative question that Melton Borough Council cannot ignore. This is not the first large solar proposal in the county. Charnwood recently approved the Mantle Solar Farm at Wymeswold — 95 hectares, 19,800 homes’ worth of electricity — despite vociferous local opposition about construction lorries on narrow village lanes and the impact on the landscape. A second major scheme at Twyford, just a few miles from the Burton Lazars site, was also approved by Melton Borough Council in late 2024, despite concerns about flooding. The cumulative picture — field after field, scheme after scheme — is one that ministers themselves have flagged. Government guidance has explicitly urged councils to consider the combined impact of multiple solar applications on any given area before rubber-stamping the next one.

Melton Mowbray is already a market town under pressure. The agricultural economy around it is the lifeblood of countless local businesses, from farm suppliers to food producers to rural pubs. The Melton area has a genuine and hard-won identity rooted in the land — this is the home of Stilton cheese, Melton Mowbray pork pies, and a farming culture that goes back to the Domesday Book. That is not sentimentality. It is economic and cultural fact. And it deserves weight in any planning decision, not just a footnote.

What local residents have every right to demand is transparency and a genuine consultation process — not one of those planning consultations that looks participatory but has already been decided. They deserve to know exactly which grade of agricultural land is being proposed for development, whether Boralex has assessed alternatives on lower-quality or brownfield sites, what the construction traffic plan looks like for the lanes around Burton Lazars, and what biodiversity enhancements are genuinely being offered rather than just listed in a document.

The fact that Boralex is not required to submit an environmental impact assessment at this stage is a legitimate concern. For a site of 118 hectares spanning eight fields in the Leicestershire countryside, that exemption feels like a significant gap. The council should not accept that situation passively.

The energy transition is real, it is necessary, and solar power has an important role to play in it. But the way we manage that transition — whose land we use, whose communities bear the visual and logistical cost, and whether local voices are genuinely heard — will determine whether the public continues to support it. Schemes that steamroller rural communities in the name of net zero do not just cause local grievance. They fuel a backlash that ultimately slows down the very transition they are meant to accelerate.

Melton Borough Council has an opportunity here to set a standard: approve clean energy where it makes genuine sense, insist on proper scrutiny where it does not, and make clear that the interests of Leicestershire communities are not simply a planning condition to be ticked off.

We will be following this application closely as it moves through the planning process. If you live near Burton Lazars, farm in the area, or have a view on what this means for Melton Mowbray — we want to hear from you.

Have Your Say

Do you support the solar farm proposal near Burton Lazars, or do you have concerns about the loss of farmland and the impact on the local landscape? Let us know in the comments below — local voices matter in planning decisions like this one. And if you want to stay across what’s happening in Melton Mowbray and across Leicestershire, sign up for our free local news updates.