Easington
Easington has 102 MW of clean power (all solar) approved and still not built: enough to supply a year's electricity to 37,000 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, £3.9m across the constituency's 42,384 homes. There is also 28 MW of wind running here on the local network. If that gets switched off, no national record shows it.
Ranks 67 of 650 for clean power approved and not built.
What is stuck, and why
| Project and developer | Tech | Size | Why it is stuck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hawthorn Pit Green Energy Park - Battery Energy StorNatPower UK | Battery | 1,000 MW |
Cannot connect to the grid until 2035Who can move it: the grid operator (NESO) and National Grid |
| Carrs Farm, South Hetton - Battery Energy Storage SyStephenson Halliday | Battery | 200 MW |
Waiting 1.2 years for a planning decisionWho can move it: County Durham Council |
| Woodlands, Windermere Road - Battery Energy StorageBuild Studios | Battery | 90 MW |
Waiting 1.1 years for a planning decisionWho can move it: County Durham Council |
What else is in the briefing
- All 17 projects, each with its planning reference and the organisation that holds the next decision
- Every approval a project still needs, and which of them the public can see
- What building them would mean here — community payments, business rates and construction work
- How Easington compares with its neighbouring constituencies
- 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