The pipeline of active large-scale pre-build large-scale solar farms (>250kWp) has seen significant growth during the past six months, and now stands at more than 4.2GW of total capacity.

This growth has been driven by the return of established greenfield developers, experienced with the UK solar planning process, and sets up the prospect of strong post-subsidy build-out during the 2020-2022 time period.

This article discusses the facts and figures behind this 67% growth in projects and pipeline capacity that has occurred in just six months, outlines the methodology used by our in-house market-research team at Solar Media, and breaks down the 4.2GW capacity across categories critical to site owners and component suppliers.

All data is taken directly from the UK Large-Scale Solar Farms: The Post-Subsidy Prospect List report that includes a full audit trail of all projects making up the 220 sites, totalling 4.234GW.

The 4.2GW pipeline of large-scale solar farms in the UK

During the past six months, the total number of sites at various stage of pre-build planning has increased by almost 70% from 131 sites at the end of October 2018, to 220 sites at the end of March 2019. This corresponds to a pipeline capacity change from 2.533GW to 4.234GW today.

During the past month, an additional 15 new sites were added to the pipeline, with a total of 846MW, driven largely by the inclusion of the Sunnica Solar Farm proposal, the specific details of which were first reported on Solar Power Portal last week.

The inclusion of the Sunnica site now means that there are 3 solar farms being reviewed under the UK’s Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) that is mandated under the Planning Act 2008 that was introduced to streamline the decision-making process for major infrastructure projects across England and Wales.

Collectively, the Sunnica Solar Farm, along with Cleve Hill Solar Farm and Little Crow Solar Farm (the other NSIP designated sites) contribute 1GW of pipeline capacity.

Interestingly, across the remaining 3.2GW of pipeline capacity, we see an increasing number of former FiT/RO-motivated planners returning to greenfield site scoping, the most noticeable of which is Lightsource BP. Prior to its investment by BP, Lightsource was highly adept at identifying discrete land sites that were conveniently nearby and could be effectively merged into one as far as construction-related issues were concerned.

The reason this is relevant today relates to the probability of any post-subsidy sites being completed. Obviously, when solar sites move into NSIP territory, the chances of planning approval become more dependent on political whims of the day.

The best way to understand this is to compare the costs and risk to building, for example, a new 300MW portfolio. Building six separate 50MW sites (exclusively through the LPA portal process) is probably a far less risky proposition than a single 300MW project.

Ultimately, whether this is true or not will be known in about three years from now when we review how much of the post-subsidy sites have come from NSIP and non-NSIP (LPA-only) routes.

However, even removing the 3 NSIP sites, the site pipeline count has grown from 131 to 220 in just six months, as shown in the graphic below.