RESIDENTS of a Callington hamlet have vowed to take the fight against a plan for the first solar farm in the UK all the way to the European Court.

American company Sunpower wants to install 15,000 solar photovoltaic panels on 17.39 hectares of land at Haye Road —one of seven sites in Cornwall and Devon that the company is looking to develop.

At a meeting of Callington Town Council's planning committee on Tuesday, attended by around 20 residents of the Haye hamlet, Christopher Forgan, whose garden backs onto the site, said he could see no benefit to the local community from the scheme, except to the renting landowner.

There have been objections on the grounds of the impact on the character and appearance of the landscape, the possible destruction of 43 acres of prime arable land, noise and glare from the panels and health concerns.

Mr Forgan said the residents applauded the Government incentive to encourage green energy through the feed-in tariff scheme — where renewable energy generators are paid a premium price for any electricity they produce — but large companies had seen the chance to cash in on an easy source of Government subsidy, exploiting the 'green energy' bandwagon for their own ends.

He said Haye Road was single track and inadequate to cope with the traffic movements that would be generated from the site, including HGVs during the farm's construction.

He added there had been no partnership with the community and even though a consultation was held in the town hall, it was so poorly advertised that only eight people visited it.

'If this goes ahead it will set a precedent for the rest of Devon and Cornwall and lead to the destruction of these counties. We will take this all the way to the European Court if we have to.'

Consultants for Sunpower. Chris Hines and Jay Mitra, said the energy produced from the five megawatt scheme, which was a relatively small scheme compared with those in America, Germany and Italy, would be enough to power 1,000 households. The energy would go into the national grid and the company has said it will put £25,000, index linked into the local community for 25 years, for sustainable projects and low carbon living.

Mr Mitra said because solar farms had not been built in the UK yet there were no studies done on the potential health impact, but he said the this project would not produce any higher voltage than the cables and substations that already existed in the national grid.

He said the panels would be connected up to a transformer and cables would go through the ground to the Callington substation in Haye Road. He said the noise from the transformer could only be heard standing close to it and there would be minimal interruption to the land, as it would be a condition that in 25 years it would have to be returned to its original state.

Cllr Rick Lumley said: 'We live in a very beautiful area of the country where 20,000 people a year go to the top of Kit Hill to walk. Will they want to look at this eyesore for the next 25 years?'

Callington town councillors asked for another consultation day to be held and raised a number of questions about the classification of the agricultural land, health and highways issues which they wanted answered before they made a decision whether to support or object to the scheme.