{"id":347684,"date":"2026-01-02T07:05:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T07:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/347684\/"},"modified":"2026-01-02T07:05:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T07:05:25","slug":"solar-to-occupy-no-more-than-0-6-of-uk-farmland-by-2030-pv-magazine-international","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/347684\/","title":{"rendered":"Solar to occupy no more than 0.6% of UK farmland by 2030 \u2013 pv magazine International"},"content":{"rendered":"

The UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) said in response to a recent Freedom of Information (FoI) request that even if all future solar projects under its solar roadmap were ground-mounted, they would occupy no more than 0.4% of the United Kingdom\u2019s total land area.<\/p>\n

December 30, 2025
\n Patrick Jowett<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

Image: Chris Robert, Unsplash<\/p>\n

Solar installations will occupy no more than 0.6% of the United Kingdom<\/a>\u2019s utilized agricultural land by 2030, according to DESNZ.<\/p>\n

The UK ministerial department shared the figure in response to a recent FoI request that asked how much agricultural land will be used for ground-mounted solar projects.<\/p>\n

Its response points to the UK government\u2019s solar roadmap<\/a>, published in June, which set out plans to achieve up to 47 GW of solar by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n

DESNZ said the 0.6% figure would only be reached if all new capacity modeled under the roadmap\u2019s high-end policy scenario were to be ground-mounted. It added that the calculation was based on the United Kingdom\u2019s total utilized agricultural land area of 16.8 million hectares.<\/p>\n

The FoI request also asked the department to explain its claim that ground-mounted solar would occupy 0.4% of UK land under its high-end policy scenario, up from about 0.1% today.<\/p>\n

In response, DESNZ pointed to Annex 1<\/a> of the solar roadmap, which says the 0.4% figure would be reached in the \u201cvery unlikely scenario\u201d where no progress on rooftop solar is made and all new solar capacity is ground-mounted projects.<\/p>\n

The percentage was calculated under the assumption of 4 acres\/MW for new projects, based on land area estimates using the government\u2019s Renewable Energy Planning Database alongside data on the United Kingdom\u2019s total land area from the country\u2019s Office of National Statistics.<\/p>\n

The United Kingdom added at least 2.5 GW<\/a> of solar in 2025, according to provisional data. While the country\u2019s largest PV plant to date<\/a> entered operations in July, 2025 has also been a strong year for distributed solar, with the UK\u2019s annual record<\/a> for rooftop solar installations broken in November.<\/p>\n

This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPopular content<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) said in response to a recent Freedom of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-347684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}