Folkestone and Hythe
Folkestone and Hythe has 1.1 MW of clean power (all solar) approved and still not built: enough to supply a year's electricity to 400 homes. When the wires are too full to carry the power, Britain pays wind farms to switch off instead. No wind farm here is paid that way — almost all of it goes to wind farms in Scotland. That cost is shared across every bill in Britain, so households here pay for it too: about £92 a year per household, £3.8m across the constituency's 41,002 homes. There is also 60 MW of wind running here on the local network. If that gets switched off, no national record shows it.
Ranks 404 of 650 for clean power approved and not built.
What is stuck, and why
| Project and developer | Tech | Size | Why it is stuck |
|---|---|---|---|
| St Mary in the Marsh - Solar PanelsEnviromena | Solar | 16 MW5,800 homes | Waiting 16 months for a planning decisionWho can move it: Folkestone and Hythe Council · planning ref 25/0542/FH |
| Martin Farm, St. Marys Road - Solar PanelsEnviromena Project Management UK Limited | Solar | 16 MW5,800 homes | Approved less than a year ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref 25/0542/FH |
| Harringe Brooks Wind ParkEcotricity | Onshore wind | 15 MW13,000 homes | Waiting 14.2 years for a planning decisionWho can move it: Folkestone and Hythe Council · planning ref Y12/0451/SH |
Compared with its neighbours
| Constituency | Approved, not built | Running | Paid to switch off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Folkestone and Hythe | 1.1 MW | 81 MW | not visible |
| Hastings and Rye | 1.2 MW | 0 MW | not visible |
| Weald of Kent | 51 MW | 30 MW | not visible |
| Ashford | 2.2 MW | 0.6 MW | not visible |
| Dover and Deal | 25 MW | 15 MW | not visible |
Weald of Kent next door has 51 MW waiting, more than Folkestone and Hythe's 1.1 MW.
The rest of the briefing
- Every approval each project still needs, and which of them the public can see
- What building them would mean here — community payments, business rates and construction work
- Drafted parliamentary questions and letters, filled in with this seat's figures
- 3 story angles for local reporting
- A two-page PDF, and a newsroom edition with the references and who to call
Everything above needs no account, and neither does the full seat page, the method or this constituency's raw data. The account covers the packaged briefing and its PDF, and nothing else.