Yes - Liz Reason, BA, MSc, Energy and Buildings Consultant, Chairman of Sustainable Charlbury

Solar farms are good. Wind farms are good. Renewable energy projects that reduce our climate change emissions are good.

That is not to say that all renewable energy projects should be supported unconditionally, nor all solar farms, but there is the potential for solar farms to transform attitudes to energy, reconnecting communities to the energy they use, giving community members the opportunity to own their own source of generation, whilst supporting security of energy supply and helping the country to reduce its carbon footprint Community energy projects emphasise local engagement, local leadership and control, and are structured to ensure that the local community benefits collectively from the outcomes.

A community-led development is guaranteed to be well-designed to minimise visual impact – because with the community acting as the developer, all interests are aligned.

This philosophy is at the heart of Sustainable Charlbury’s approach to its proposed renewable energy development, Southill Solar.

Southill Solar, a proposed 5MW solar farm on the outskirts of Charlbury, represents an exciting opportunity for us to make a real difference. Not only are we engaging the three communities that surround the site – Charlbury, Fawler and Finstock – but the cooperative community-benefit company will allow us to offer shares to individuals and organisations in the community, and to return a significant sum every year to residents to support energy-saving investments and other community initiatives to reduce out local carbon footprint. We are currently consulting all residents about their attitude to community renewable energy and their willingness to invest.

Our solar farm design is sensitive to the site, using the contours and historical field patterns to make the farm all but invisible. The grade 3b agricultural land will be transformed to significantly enhance biodiversity with wildflower meadows, sheep-grazing, and tree-planting.

A community energy strategy will be published in autumn 2013. We expect it to give wholehearted support to schemes such as ours, which make communities stronger.

Sustainable Charlbury is a six-year-old community group whose mission statement is “To inspire, encourage and empower groups and individuals within the community to reduce their carbon emissions”. Over the years, we have undertaken many projects to raise awareness of energy use and climate change emissions, and to make energy wastage visible.

NO - Peter Challis, resident of Besselsleigh where Hive Energy is proposing to build a 120-acre solar farm

The only thing a solar farm will do for you is increase your electricity bill.

That is a fairly extreme view of solar energy, and is of course only part of the story. However, it is true that every time a new solar farm is built it adds to your energy bill. This is because the government forces the energy suppliers to buy this expensive electricity and pass the cost on to you, the consumer, in the form of an inflated electricity bill.

At a time when the cost of living keeps on rising, many households are increasingly questioning why they will have to pay an extra £270 per year on their energy bills by 2020 to cover green levies which are supported by only 18 per cent of voters.

Apart from the cost to us all of these solar power stations, they can also have a devastating impact on our green and pleasant countryside. There is a growing groundswell of opinion that enough is enough; this is especially true where there is a proposal to cover productive Greenbelt farmland with a sea of glass and steel.

In this country we are far from being self-sufficient in food production; we import 40 per cent of our food, but we import only one per cent of our electricity. How can it be sensible to convert productive farmland into a solar farm?

Successive governments have been negligent in their duty to provide this country with a long term green and sustainable energy policy. Hopefully the announcement of the contract to build the Hinkley Point C power station is the start of Britain’s new energy policy to provide CO2 free energy at lower cost than solar, wind, tidal, or any other green technology available to us at present.

Inevitably some alternative electricity generation will be needed in the short to medium-term but this should not be allowed to blight our countryside. Solar farms are not even an effective way of keeping the lights on – in fact they don’t actually generate electricity when most of us want to turn our lights on. The sun shines for only 36 per cent of the time in this country and most of that is in the summer when our electricity use is at its lowest, so solar farms are not a viable solution to our short term green energy needs.

Eric Pickles, the Local Government Secretary, recently overturned a planning application for a solar farm at Ellough Airfield in Suffolk. He said: “In this case, the increase in the amount of renewable energy generated by the scheme does not outweigh the additional harm caused to the character and appearance of the area.”

Planning permission for these power stations should never be granted in the green belt, in areas of natural beauty, where there is visual impact, or where there is local opposition.