The former chairman of Luton Town Football Club is seeking investment to build a green data centre and floating solar farm on a 143-acre site in Bedford.
David Kohler has appointed Cushman & Wakefield and Vandermolen Real Estate to secure a funder to acquire the freehold or enter a jv on the development opportunity at Quest Park, to the south-west of the town.
The developer has started pre-application discussions with Central Bedfordshire Council for an 840,000 sq ft data centre on 28 acres of land at the main access point, and 25 acres of photovoltaic panels on the lake.
Quest Pit was the last active clay pit in Bedfordshire, extracting Oxford Clay before ceasing operations in 2008.
During the following year the site gained consent for a 1m sq ft conservation, leisure and education facility, complete with a water adventure park, spa, three hotels and a science research park for the National Institute for Research into Aquatic Habits. However, the site fell into administration in 2015.
Kohler bought the site from its administrators at Moorfields Advisory that year with a vision to create a floating solar farm, as a pure infrastructure project funded by government subsidies for renewable energy.
He said: “I had an idea about six years ago for a floating solar farm to maximise the yield from the sun.” His concept, inspired by rooftop solar farms and a floating village in Amsterdam, would allow panels to be repositioned in different directions to capture light.
However, the government removed the subsidy on solar energy within a few months of his purchase. “I then had 143 acres in the middle of Bedford and the scheme that I wanted to put on it wasn’t viable,” said Kohler.
He entered talks with McLaren on a driver experience centre and explored residential development, before returning to the solar farm concept to include input from an occupier as an end-user.
“The pre-application with the local authority is as positive as I have ever seen, because it stimulates everything. It is an infrastructure project and they want to improve the area,” he added.
The site is just over five miles south-west of Bedford town centre, located within the Oxford-Cambridge-London Golden Triangle of technology and life sciences organisations.
Less than a mile away, a new station is to be built at Wixams. Housing association L&Q is also developing a 4,500-home village on 750 acres of land acquired from Gallagher Estates.
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