Luton South and South Bedfordshire
Luton South and South Bedfordshire has 4.5 MW of clean power (mostly solar) approved and still not built: enough to supply a year's electricity to 2,400 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, £4.1m across the constituency's 44,991 homes.
Ranks 270 of 650 for clean power approved and not built.
What is stuck, and why
| Project and developer | Tech | Size | Why it is stuck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Watling Street, Caddington - Solar FarmChiltern Renewables Hockliffe Limited | Solar | 20 MW7,100 homes | Approved less than a year ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref CB/24/02069/FULL |
| Astral Green - Wind Turbine, Solar Array & Battery Energy Storage SystemArnold White Estates Limited | Solar | 2.1 MW800 homes | Approved 2 years ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref CB/23/03278/FULL |
| Astral Green - Wind Turbine, Solar Array & Battery Energy Storage SystemArnold White Estates Limited | Onshore wind | 1.5 MW1,300 homes | Approved 2 years ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref CB/23/03278/FULL |
Compared with its neighbours
| Constituency | Approved, not built | Running | Paid to switch off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Luton South and South Bedfordshire | 4.5 MW | 18 MW | not visible |
| Harpenden and Berkhamsted | 0.3 MW | 13 MW | not visible |
| Aylesbury | 52 MW | 44 MW | not visible |
| Luton North | 0.7 MW | 0 MW | not visible |
| Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard | 76 MW | 13 MW | not visible |
| Hitchin | 50 MW | 33 MW | not visible |
Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard next door has 76 MW waiting, more than Luton South and South Bedfordshire's 4.5 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.