Newcastle-under-Lyme
Newcastle-under-Lyme 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, £3.7m across the constituency's 40,092 homes.
Ranks 413 of 650 for clean power approved and not built.
What is stuck, and why
| Project and developer | Tech | Size | Why it is stuck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rubber and Allied ProductsVolta Energy Storage | Battery | 40 MW | Approved 9 years ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref 17/00847/FUL |
Compared with its neighbours
| Constituency | Approved, not built | Running | Paid to switch off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Newcastle-under-Lyme | 1.1 MW | 6.3 MW | not visible |
| Stafford | 0.9 MW | 0 MW | not visible |
| North Shropshire | 11 MW | 80 MW | not visible |
| Crewe and Nantwich | 7.8 MW | 8 MW | not visible |
| Chester South and Eddisbury | 19 MW | 30 MW | not visible |
| Stoke-on-Trent South | 115 MW | 14 MW | not visible |
Stoke-on-Trent South next door has 115 MW waiting, more than Newcastle-under-Lyme'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
- 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.