Renewable Energy Projects in Great Britain

Every renewable electricity project in Great Britain above the reporting threshold appears in one government database — from a scheme somebody sketched and abandoned to the wind farm generating down the road. It is unusually complete, and unusually easy to misread.

The trap is simple: the database is a record of applications, not of things that exist. Counting everything in it as capacity Britain has, or is about to have, overstates reality substantially.

What the planning database records

The Renewable Energy Planning Database tracks each project through the planning system: who is proposing it, what technology, how large, where, and what stage it has reached. Entries stay in the database after they are refused, withdrawn or abandoned, which is what makes it useful for seeing the whole pipeline rather than only the successes.

It covers Great Britain — England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland runs a separate planning system and is not included here.

Projects across Great Britain

Grouped by status and technology. Read the status labels carefully: they are doing most of the work.

What is planned near you

Projects are recorded against the local planning authority that decides them. Enter a postcode to find yours — it is resolved to an authority code and is never stored, logged or placed in the URL.

Status is everything

Every project carries a planning status, and the difference between them is the difference between a press release and a power station.

• Application submitted — somebody has asked. Many never get further.
• Awaiting construction — consented but not started. Real permission, no concrete.
• Under construction — being built now, and the strongest signal in the database.
• Operational — generating.
• Refused, withdrawn, abandoned — did not happen, and retained deliberately so the pipeline is honest about attrition.

Add every megawatt in the database together and you get a number far larger than anything Britain will build, because it includes refused schemes, abandoned ones and duplicates at different stages. The summaries above keep the statuses apart for that reason.

What the capacities actually mean

Capacity is quoted in megawatts, and a megawatt of one technology is not a megawatt of another. This is the second most common way to misread the database after status.

A megawatt is the maximum a project can produce at full output. What it delivers over a year is that figure multiplied by how much of the time it actually runs — the capacity factor. Offshore wind in British waters typically runs at roughly two-fifths of its rating averaged across the year; onshore wind rather less; solar in this country less again, because half of every day is dark and much of the rest is cloudy.

So a 50 MW solar farm and a 50 MW offshore wind farm are not equivalent additions to the system, and neither is comparable to 50 MW of gas that can run whenever it is asked to. When comparing entries here, compare like with like, and treat any conversion into “homes powered” with suspicion — that figure depends entirely on the capacity factor and the household consumption assumed, and both are usually chosen to flatter.

The other thing capacity does not tell you is physical footprint. Solar needs far more land per megawatt than wind does, while a wind turbine is far more visible from a distance. Two projects with the same number against them can affect an area in completely different ways. Our power stations page shows the same units for plant that is already running, which is a useful sense check on scale.

Why consented projects do not get built

The gap between “awaiting construction” and “operational” is where most of the interesting failure happens, and planning permission is rarely the reason.

The most common obstacle is the grid. A project needs a connection agreement before it can export anything, and the queue for one has run into years — long enough that some consented schemes expire waiting. That queue is visible on the grid connection queue page, and reading it alongside this one gives a much better sense of what is genuinely coming.

Beyond that: finance has to be arranged in a market where costs have moved; supply chains for turbines and transformers are long; and for many schemes the economics depend on securing a government contract for the electricity, which is competitive and not guaranteed.

If something is proposed near you

Renewable schemes go through the same planning process as any other development, and the consultation is genuinely open — anyone can comment, not only immediate neighbours.

Two practical points. Comments carry more weight when they engage with planning considerations — landscape impact, noise, traffic during construction, ecology — than with whether renewable energy is a good idea in general. And larger schemes above a size threshold are decided nationally rather than by the local council, which changes who you write to and the timetable you are working to.

If what you actually want is to know what is already generating rather than what is proposed, the power stations page lists the operating fleet, and live electricity shows what wind and solar are contributing at this moment.