Battery energy storage systems pose a serious potential safety hazard. Especially given the risk of Russian sabotage, they should not be placed next to UK defence facilities nor should they be close to residential areas.
Yet that is exactly what the Government is doing by pushing ahead with the massive Sunnica solar and battery farm. It will be a stone’s throw from RAF Mildenhall, towns and villages and Newmarket’s historic and irreplaceable racing industry.
In February 2025, Nick Timothy MP asked the Ministry of Defence to object to Sunnica, given the risks involved. They refused (as you can see from the reply below), discounting the serious potential risk with a remarkable sentence: “The MOD cannot object to developments just on the possibility that there may be an impact to Defence activities should a specific chain of events occur.” This is not a sensible way to make decisions that affect national security and public safety.
You might be interested in reading Mr Timothy’s column on this topic, published in April 2025 edition of the Newmarket Flyer, which is reproduced below:
Mr Timothy also raised the concerns with the Defence Secretary on Wednesday 27 November 2024 following incidents which saw several unidentified drones flying in the vicinity of the Suffolk airbases over the weekend.
Speaking in a Westminster Hall debate at the time, Mr Timothy said: “The Director General of Mi5 recently said that we now face state-backed sabotage and we should expect to see continued Russian acts of aggression here at home. They are ‘on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more’.”
Touching on the potential risk both to residents and to the West Suffolk air bases, Mr Timothy said: “BESS fires on similar sites have been caused by lithium battery failure leading to thermal runaway. This can cause explosions and the resulting fires cannot be extinguished using conventional methods. Four years ago a fire at a BESS site in Liverpool took 59 hours to put out. And similar stories apply elsewhere around the world where these facilities have been constructed. The fires emit toxic fumes which means that people in the vicinity must remain indoors throughout.
“So I think that the risk to the sites given the location of the Sunnica solar farm is quite obvious.”
