The UK's largest solar scheme, the 350 MW Cleve Hill Solar Park in Kent, was granted consent Thursday by the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Alok Sharma.
The project, on Graveney Marshes on the North Kent coast in Southeast England, has been opposed by Kent Wildlife Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which fear the 890-acre, 800,000-panel project will threaten local wildlife.
Joint venture developers Hive Energy and Wirsol Energy said the solar farm would generate enough renewable electricity to power over 91,000 homes, equivalent to around 264 GWh/year using Ofgem's typical domestic consumption mid-point figure.
The scheme would "reduce the UK's dependence on fossil fuels and lower CO2 emissions by 68,000 tonnes a year," the developers said.
UK solar growth has been feeble since the closure of the Renewables Obligation support scheme March 31, 2017, and the closure of the Feed-in Tariff scheme to new applicants March 31, 2019.
As of the end of April, there was 13,493 MW installed UK solar capacity across around 1.03 million installations, BEIS said. This is an increase of less than 1.5% (195 MW) since April 2019.
Some 57% of the total solar capacity (7,696 MW) relates to larger ground-mounted or standalone installations. This includes two operational solar farms accredited for Contracts for Differences -- the 15 MW Charity and 12 MW Triangle solar farms.
In December, Gridserve completed a 34.7 MW zero-subsidy solar farm at York, the largest to be completed since 2016, pioneering a new commercial model using 30 MWh of battery storage.
Meanwhile, an application for Sunnica's 500 MW solar scheme across the Burwell and Mildenhall sites in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire is expected to be submitted to the Planning Inspectorate in Q2/Q3 2020, the inspectorate said.
