Every quarter the government publishes the Renewable Energy Planning Database: a record of every renewable energy project in the country and what stage it has reached. It is not summarised, so almost nobody reads it.
We do. Here is what it says about solar farms that have planning permission but have not been built.
The headline
324 ground-mount solar projects between 1MW and 20MW hold planning consent in Great Britain and Northern Ireland but have not been built. Together they are 2,244MW.
Of those, 157 projects, nearly half, were consented three years ago or more. That is 1,048MW sitting on permissions at or past the point where a standard consent has to be begun.
| Time since consent | Projects | Share | Capacity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 23 | 7% | 166MW |
| 1 to 2 years | 76 | 24% | 522MW |
| 2 to 3 years | 68 | 21% | 507MW |
| 3 to 5 years | 115 | 36% | 773MW |
| Over 5 years | 42 | 13% | 276MW |
The oldest still listed as unbuilt was consented in December 2013.
Why three years matters
A full planning permission in England and Wales normally has to be begun within three years, unless the decision notice says otherwise. Miss it and the permission lapses.
So that bottom block of the table is not a queue. It is a cliff edge. Some of those 157 projects will have started on site, some will have had the period extended, and some are already dead and have not been recorded as such. But a developer holding one of them should know which.
The database shows what happens to the ones that do not make it: 118 ground-mount solar projects (1,056MW) are recorded as having expired planning permission, and a further 112 (759MW) as abandoned.
Four in five have no battery
Of the 324 projects, 260 have no co-located storage recorded against them. That is 80%.
This is the single largest piece of unused value in the cohort. A battery on a site that already holds a grid connection is adding earning capacity to a connection somebody has already won, rather than joining the back of the queue for a new one.
It is worse in some regions than others:
| Region | No battery recorded |
|---|---|
| East Midlands | 26 of 27 (96%) |
| South West | 50 of 59 (85%) |
| North West | 24 of 29 (83%) |
| South East | 30 of 38 (79%) |
| Eastern | 38 of 49 (78%) |
| Scotland | 34 of 45 (76%) |
Nobody owns very many of them
279 distinct operators hold the 324 projects. 249 of them hold exactly one.
That matters more than it looks. A developer with a portfolio has a grid team, a funding line and a reason to keep pushing. Someone holding a single consented field usually has none of those, which is a large part of why these sites stop moving. The biggest holder in the whole cohort has five.
Where they are
| Region | Projects | Capacity | Consented 3+ years ago |
|---|---|---|---|
| South West | 59 | 493MW | 27 |
| Eastern | 49 | 368MW | 20 |
| Scotland | 45 | 355MW | 24 |
| South East | 38 | 268MW | 22 |
| North West | 29 | 162MW | 11 |
| East Midlands | 27 | 174MW | 14 |
| Wales | 25 | 118MW | 12 |
| West Midlands | 22 | 169MW | 15 |
| Yorkshire and Humber | 15 | 67MW | 6 |
| North East | 11 | 60MW | 6 |
| Northern Ireland | 4 | 10MW | 0 |
For context: the whole unbuilt pipeline
The 1–20MW ground-mount band is a small slice of a very large pipeline:
| Technology | Consented, not built | Capacity |
|---|---|---|
| Solar PV (all types) | 3,962 | 26,784MW |
| Battery storage | 1,328 | 72,098MW |
| Onshore wind | 372 | 7,238MW |
Most of the solar project count is rooftop: 2,890 schemes carrying just 1,259MW between them, typically businesses generating for their own use. The ground-mount capacity sits overwhelmingly in the 20MW-plus band, which professional developers hold and generally do build.
Where the figures come from
Everything above is our own analysis of the government’s published planning data, current to July 2026. The database is public; these breakdowns are not published anywhere and are not available off the shelf.
One thing to watch if you are comparing our numbers with others: our capacities are AC export capacity, not MWp. A UK ground-mount site is typically 1.25 to 1.35 MWp per MWac, so these figures will look smaller than MWp numbers quoted elsewhere for the same sites.
What we are less sure about
- The records go stale. A site still listed as unbuilt may have been built, abandoned, or had its consent extended without the record catching up. The December 2013 entry is far more likely a stale record than a live permission, so treat the oldest tail as soft.
- Three years is the default, not the rule. Decision notices can and do set different periods, and conditions can be varied. The age table is a prompt to check your own decision notice, not a verdict on any site.
- Some of the underlying detail is self-reported by developers, and incomplete on a minority of sites.
What we take from it
Roughly a gigawatt of small and mid-sized British solar holds a consent that is at or past its start-by date, four fifths of it has no battery beside it, and almost all of it is held by people who own one site and nothing else.
That is not a story about a failing industry. It is a story about a lot of individually small assets with nobody whose full-time job it is to move them.
If one of them is yours, we buy consented sites, partner on them, or fix the one thing that is stuck. If you just want to understand the options, start with what to do with a consented site that has not been built.
Sources
- legislation.gov.uk: Town and Country Planning Act 1990, section 91 (time limit on planning permissions)
First edition, 2 November 2026, current to July 2026. We will update it as new data is published. Figures are our own analysis and may be quoted with a link to this page.
Working from a consented site of your own and want the detail behind these numbers for your region? Ask us.