So we are going for a solar Swindon? Well I suppose if we must be surrounded by swathes of these ugly black mirrors, a wall down the side of the M4 motorway is as good as anywhere.

But the latest wheeze, turning good productive pasture into “PV farms”, is surely a step from the simply ridiculous to the outright absurd.

We have Wroughton Downs with its attendant bribery, a cancer spreading along the Swindon/Wootton Bassett Road, acres of them in South Marston and now Water Eaton. Worse still, this idiocy is going on all over the country.

Only in this country could we abandon the growing of food on some of the most fertile land on the globe, ramping up both imports and dependency exponentially, and instead create great ugly blots on the landscape making fortunes for failed farmers and speculators and paid for by me and you in our electricity bills.

We plan to build 150,000 houses a year going forward. A change in building regulations requiring solar in all new builds will easily add 3.3 million panels annually to our stock (based on 18 to 24 panels per) Better still set Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey on to the Chinese, and if they negotiate with them in same the way they treat small tradesmen, you can watch the cost plummet!

And this is without the vast potential on roofs of import warehouses which populate every corner of our once productive trading estates.

And what about millions of square feet on top of retail sheds, remaining factories and offices, public buildings, sewage works etc etc, where power is actually consumed in the daytime and where in most cases they cannot be made architecturally any worse?

How many more panels could we possibly need in a north European country with six to eight hours of daytime sunshine and little or none in the winter?

To deliver serious long term renewables we should scrap HS2 and its tiny improvements in rail journey times and spend the £50 billion on tidal, hydro schemes and designing innovative systems to store surplus renewable energy presently going to waste. Windmills? well if you must but as far out to sea as is commercially viable.

Now I am certainly not anti renewables.. far from it. Why would anyone use fossil fuels to power air con in hot sunny countries?

I’m an old man and thought I had seen most establishment lunacy in my lifetime but this reaches new heights. Subsuming good farmland under glass which generates little power when the sun is shining, hardly any when it’s dull and zero at night with alternative unused locations … I despair!

But hey, Mystic John can indeed see into the future. I can actually predict what’s coming next. “Sadly with cheap Chinese panels collapsing after ten years and infeed tariffs declining to a level where maintenance and upgrade are not justified etc etc, we are however left with a rather nice brownfield site in beautiful countryside just right for some serious... what was that Taylor Wimpey phone number again?”

John Stooke, Haydon End