🐉 The 75MW Llanwern Solar Farm in Wales is the largest in the UK

🌞 There are more than 1,300 operational solar farms – and thousands to come

🏰 Project Fortress, a 373MW solar farm being built in Kent, is set to be the biggest

Eveley Farm is the southernmost farm on this list, located in the Hampshire countryside.

Its 186,000 JinkoSolar-supplied panels produce enough solar electricity to power 12,300 homes in the surrounding Test Valley.

It took two years to gain approval for the site, with the local council rejecting the first proposal and the UK government stepping in to stop the revised version moving forward. It took a national election and a subsequent cabinet reshuffle to eventually clear the way.

As well as transforming into a major solar electricity supplier, Eveley Farm has also become more biodiverse since the site was commissioned, due to increased soil fertility.

Soil erosion is down, herbicides and pesticides aren’t required, and breeding birds are flocking to the farm.

Snarlton Farm, also known as Melksham Solar Farm, is found just to the east of Bath.

Thanks to Canadian Solar and Korean manufacturer S-Energy’s solar panels, it currently produces enough electricity to save more than 10,500 tonnes of CO2 per year, according to our calculations.

Getting the local authority’s permission took 19 months and one refused application, but the actual construction period was a relatively short four months.

Appropriately for such a positive addition to the Wiltshire landscape, the solar panels look like a giant hand giving a thumbs up when viewed from above.

To the north of Bristol is Larks Green, the first solar farm in the UK to send the electricity it produces directly to the National Grid.

Up until now, solar farms have exclusively funnelled their electricity into their regional Distribution Network Operators (DNO) – that is, the organisations that run the hardware supplying different areas of the UK with electricity.

DNO electricity must be used locally, whereas electricity sent to the National Grid can be transmitted across the country, opening up new possibilities for solar farms in sunny locations to power homes across the country.

The newest addition to this list is situated next to the grid’s Iron Acton substation and boasts 152,400 solar panels, as well as a 99MWh (megawatt-hours) battery storage system.

This allows the solar farm to store energy when the sun shines, then sell it to the grid during peak periods – like a large-scale version of a household on a smart solar export tariff, such as Intelligent Octopus Flux.

Due to the sudden eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, it took eight months for the site’s owners to go from securing planning permission to starting construction on The Grange, and another eight months to get it up and running.

Lightsource BP, which attained its name during energy giant BP’s takeover of solar farm developer Lightsource, has constructed 12 solar farms and is in the process of building another 10 – but it sold this one in 2021.

The NextEnergy Solar Fund trust bought The Grange and another solar farm from Lightsource BP for £64.3 million.

The oldest solar farm on this list was switched on in March 2015, at a former Royal Air Force base that was used from 1939 to 1994.

The site, which is composed of around 200,000 panels, has been sold twice since it was commissioned, first to manufacturer Trina Solar, then to the Bluefield Solar Income Fund.

It’s also one of many solar farms on this list to have a capacity between 49 and 49.9MW (megawatts).

In total, 224 applications have been made in recent years for solar farms with this capacity – and there’s a good reason.

The UK’s planning laws classify any solar site with a capacity over 50MW as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project, which means it can only be approved by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s Secretary of State.

So instead of going through the local authority’s planning process, developers of larger solar farms are forced to wait for a chance to convince a politician with a national brief and thousands of duties.

This put off many companies from surpassing the 50MW mark – but in 2021, the government finally clarified that this limit applied to a solar farm’s actual output, rather than its peak power output.

The impact of this news was never going to be instant, as solar farm creation takes time, but we should see an influx of sites with larger capacities over the coming years.

The northernmost solar farm on this list – and one of two sites in Wales in our top two – took just four-and-a-half months to build.

Chinese manufacturer Jetion Solar supplied around 250,000 panels for the project, all with a peak power rating of 255 watts.

The solar farm was designed and built by a partnership of British Solar Renewables, Compton Group, and WElink Energy UK, before being sold to the Foresight Solar Fund in 2017.

Around 60% of Shotwick’s electricity goes towards powering the local Shotton paper mill.

The biggest solar farm in the UK is located in south-east Wales, between Newport and the Bristol Channel.

Spread over three sites, this huge project cost NextEnergy Capital £43 million to build, all of which was financed by Santander Group.

Llanwern is home to 187,500 solar panels, each with a 400W peak power rating.

NextEnergy also created a 40-year environmental plan for the area, with Natural Resources Wales and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, to “restore the landscape for the specific benefit of rare birds, small mammals, and invertebrates.”