LONDON — Conservative MPs, months out from a general election and lagging badly behind their Labour opponents, are in the fight of their lives.

Polls suggests they could even collapse into a squabbling rump of fewer than 100 MPs.

And one potential contribution to that collapse? A series of vast solar farms proposed across well-heeled heartland Tory seats, to the alarm of would-be voters and the MPs scrambling to keep their support.

The farms are often huge. Botley West, the largest proposed solar farm in the U.K., will span 11 miles of Oxfordshire countryside. Great North Road, a rival mega-project in Nottinghamshire, will create a ring of steel and glass made up of 1.5 million solar panels, covering nearly 7,000 acres of land. And everywhere such projects spring up, so do local campaigns, worried about everything from food security to the spoiled view from their windows.

Analysis by POLITICO shows that the overwhelming majority of constituencies hosting the largest proposed solar farms — 25 out of 27 schemes waiting for permission to build — are held by Tory MPs. Forecasts show many of these seats are vulnerable to swinging away from the incumbents at the next general election, as the Conservative vote craters.

On the frontline

The government is determined to overhaul the U.K. energy system and drive a nearly five-fold increase in solar generation between now and 2035, in order to hit legally-binding net zero goals. That means a stream of proposals to build solar farms on the English countryside, and dozens of local battles against those developments.

These farms can be extremely unpopular with voters, even when the public broadly support efforts to protect the climate. “Any sort of local developments — both in terms of housing and energy projects — are difficult to navigate in terms of the nuances of public opinion. People can support the ideas in principle but be squeamish in reality,” says Scarlett Maguire, director of the polling company JL Partners.

Some of Westminster’s biggest beasts are now confronted with exactly this squeamishness. Solar developers are proposing projects in the Witham constituency of former Home Secretary Priti Patel, the Yorkshire constituency of former Brexit Secretary David Davis, and the Suffolk seat of Thérèse Coffey, who served as deputy prime minister to Liz Truss.

Robert Jenrick, Tory MP for Newark near Nottingham and a former immigration minister, has his eye on being the next Conservative leader. But for Jenrick, too, solar poses a more immediate challenge.

Two vast solar farms are proposed for his constituency, including Great North Road, which on its own could generate enough power for 400,000 homes. Another, One Earth, could keep the lights on in around 200,000 homes, according to the developer. These are just two out of more than a dozen schemes planned for a corridor of Tory-dominated countryside stretching through Lincolnshire, running north from Peterborough to Yorkshire.

Local groups on Jenrick’s patch are animated in opposition. David White, who leads the North Clifton Action Group campaigning against the proposals, told POLITICO that, because of the potential impact of the solar farms, “many here are having severe difficulty sleeping at night. These are people who would normally be quietly working and bringing up their families or enjoying their retirement.”

“We’ve had Covid, the cost of living crisis, and now this,” North Clifton resident Maggie Firth told her local newspaper.

Jenrick has lobbied local councils against both schemes. “I am not opposed to solar farms in principle,” he said. But it is “incumbent” on MPs to represent their constituents’ concerns and “work to mitigate the worst impacts” of solar developments, he added.

But projects this size are decided not by the local council but by Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho, on advice from the planning inspectorate.

The opposition may be local — but the fight goes to the heart of Whitehall.

The fight

Jenrick is not the only nervous Conservative.

Head a few miles north and Caroline Johnson, the MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham, faces two proposed solar farms in her seat. Edward Leigh MP trumps both Jenrick and Johnson — there are three farms planned for his neighboring Gainsborough constituency.

Survation polling from March suggests that, with the Conservatives shedding votes all over the country, Leigh and Johnson may cling onto their supposedly safe Tory seats. But it forecasts that Jenrick will be toppled, despite his 22,000-plus majority.

Conservative MPs are fighting back in their heartlands. They want to show wavering voters that they are on the side of local campaigners — even if the government, with its overarching net zero aims, is not.

Johnson has demanded a total halt to large net zero projects. Picturesque English villages risk being drowned in solar projects, she says, arguing “it is wrong that developers bypass local opinion and industrialize large swathes of countryside with seas of solar panels.”   

She has taken her case directly to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and said — after meeting the PM — that she believed he “will not allow” solar to spring up all over the British countryside. Number 10 Downing Street said it does not comment on private conversations.

Leigh has promised his voters they have “a good chance of succeeding” in pushing back solar plans. The government has delayed some big solar decisions, in moves that have helped get local MPs out of a tight spot.

A decision on Sunnica Energy Farm, a 1,500 acre project in Suffolk, has been delayed four times since inspectors made their recommendations to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in June 2023. Coutinho has now pushed that decision to the middle of the summer.

That brought some breathing space for local MP and former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, once a Conservative and now sitting as an independent, who declared: “It’s time to put a stop to Sunnica once and for all.” But those delays also drew the ire of even the keenly non-partisan Solar Energy UK trade body, whose chief executive Chris Hewitt slammed the “prevarication” and impact on growth and jobs in the region.

The Labour Party might be enjoying Tory discomfort. But it's only a few months away from inheriting the same problems if, as polls keep suggesting, Labour wins the general election. “It doesn’t look like it will be a problem for the Conservatives for too much longer. It will soon be Labour’s headache, too,” Maguire, the pollster, says. “At the moment they are saying they [solar farms] will be built in Conservative constituencies, but both parties need to acknowledge that a degree of local buy-in will be needed.”

For now, though, it's incumbent Tory MPs who are feeling the pressure from that lack of buy-in. And they are running out of time.