South Cambridgeshire
South Cambridgeshire has 27 MW of clean power (all solar) approved and still not built: enough to supply a year's electricity to 9,800 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, £4.0m across the constituency's 42,956 homes. There is also 26 MW of wind running here on the local network. If that gets switched off, no national record shows it.
Ranks 178 of 650 for clean power approved and not built.
What is stuck, and why
| Project and developer | Tech | Size | Why it is stuck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low Fen, Drove Way - Solar FarmSouth Cambridgeshire District Council | Solar | 50 MW18,000 homes | Waiting 17 months for a planning decisionWho can move it: South Cambridgeshire Council · planning ref 25/01014/FUL |
| River Mel Solar Farm & Battery Storage SystemQuintas Cleantech | Battery | 25 MW | Waiting 12 months for a planning decisionWho can move it: South Cambridgeshire Council · planning ref 25/02739/FUL |
| River Mel Solar Farm & Battery Storage SystemQuintas Cleantech | Solar | 25 MW9,100 homes | Waiting 12 months for a planning decisionWho can move it: South Cambridgeshire Council · planning ref 25/02739/FUL |
| Highfield Farm, Royston Road - Solar Farm & Battery StorageGrupotec Solar 3 UK Limited | Solar | 18 MW6,500 homes | Approved 3 years ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref 23/01317/FUL |
| Streetly Hall Farm, West Wickham - Anaerobic Digestion Renewable Energy FacilityStreetly Hall Farm | Anaerobic Digestion | 7 MW | Approved 2 years ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref CCC/23/110/FUL |
| Barton Road, Barton - Solar FarmCambridge University Director Of Estates | Solar | 5 MW1,800 homes | Approved 3 years ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref 22/00051/FUL |
Plus 3 smaller projects — see the full seat page.
Compared with its neighbours
| Constituency | Approved, not built | Running | Paid to switch off |
|---|---|---|---|
| South Cambridgeshire | 27 MW | 251 MW | not visible |
| North West Essex | 623 MW | 68 MW | not visible |
| Braintree | 51 MW | 70 MW | not visible |
| North Bedfordshire | 74 MW | 97 MW | not visible |
| North East Hertfordshire | 75 MW | 15 MW | not visible |
| Cambridge | 1.5 MW | 0 MW | not visible |
North West Essex next door has 623 MW waiting, more than South Cambridgeshire's 27 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.