Lowestoft
Lowestoft has 20 MW of renewables running, enough for 10,000 homes over a year, and nothing large waiting in the planning queue. 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, £3.9m across the constituency's 42,792 homes.
Ranks 550 of 650 for clean power approved and not built.
What is stuck, and why
| Project and developer | Tech | Size | Why it is stuck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ashby Dell, Border Lane - Solar FarmSky UK Development Limited | Solar | 30 MW11,000 homes | Applied in 2025, still waiting for a decisionWho can move it: East Suffolk Council · planning ref DC/25/2853/FUL |
| Copeland Way, Ellough - Anaerobic Digestion PlantPrivilege Finance Limited | Anaerobic Digestion | 10 MW | Refused by East Suffolk Council in 2024Who can move it: East Suffolk Council · planning ref SCC/0124/22W |
| Ness PointConrad Energy | Hydrogen | 3 MW | Approved 5 years ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref DC/21/5329/FUL |
Compared with its neighbours
| Constituency | Approved, not built | Running | Paid to switch off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lowestoft | 0.2 MW | 20 MW | not visible |
| Suffolk Coastal | 52 MW | 24 MW | not visible |
| Waveney Valley | 59 MW | 64 MW | not visible |
| South Norfolk | 104 MW | 37 MW | not visible |
| Great Yarmouth | 1.6 MW | 16 MW | not visible |
South Norfolk next door has 104 MW waiting, more than Lowestoft's 0.2 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
- 2 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.