No.135 of 650 · approved, not built MP: Alistair Strathern (Labour) England

Hitchin

Hitchin has 50 MW of clean power (all solar) approved and still not built: enough to supply a year's electricity to 18,000 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, £3.7m across the constituency's 40,758 homes. There is also 20 MW of wind running here on the local network. If that gets switched off, no national record shows it.

Not visible
here

20 MW of wind is running in this constituency, but it sits on the local network rather than the national grid — so if it is paid to switch off, no national record shows it. That is why this seat has no figure here: not because nothing happens, but because nobody publishes it. The £ figure for this seat is a floor, not a zero.

how we worked this out

50 MW

of clean power — all solar — approved and still not built, enough to supply a year's electricity to 18,000 homes. Approved at least two years ago; waiting on the grid, not on planning. That is 1.5× the renewable capacity actually running here.

2 projects · planning database (REPD), July 2026 · how we worked this out

£3.7m

is what the grid gap costs this constituency's 40,758 households in a year between them — £92 each, about 51 days of one home's electricity.

The £92 per household is a national figure — identical in every GB seat. Only the seat total varies, with the number of households · NESO · how we worked this out

The waiting list

2 of 2 waiting projects · years since approval

Chesfield Downs Golf Club, Jacks Hill - Solar panels 0.2 MW

2.8 YRS

Wymondley Solar Farm, Great Wymondley 50 MW

2.4 YRS

Every approved, unbuilt project

approved 24+ months ago, still not generating · planning database, July 2026

Site	Technology	Enough for	Capacity	Approved	Waiting
Wymondley Solar Farm, Great Wymondley	Solar Photovoltaics	18,000 homes	50.0 MW	2024-03	2.4 yrs
Chesfield Downs Golf Club, Jacks Hill - Solar panels	Solar Photovoltaics	100 homes	0.2 MW	2023-10	2.8 yrs

Plus 3 more approved within the last two years.

Batteries

projects of 10 MW and above · planning database, July 2026 · what batteries do →

Site	Size	Status	While discharging
Stevenage Road, Titmore Green - Battery Energy Storage System	57 MW	in planning	could supply ≈200,000 homes
St Ippolyts - Solar Farm & Battery Storage	12 MW	approved, not built 2025	could supply ≈44,000 homes

What this page does not show

Smaller wind farms on the local grid are also switched off; national data does not show it, so the £ figure here is a floor, not a zero. Offshore wind is counted nationally, never per seat. The planning database can run a quarter behind reality.

Electricity does not travel from a particular project to particular houses. Everything generated goes into the national grid and everyone draws from that shared pool, so "enough for X homes" is a way of sizing the electricity — not a claim that these homes would be powered by this site. Battery storage is counted separately from generation: it moves power in time rather than making it.

Planning statuses come from the government's planning database (REPD), which records what was decided and when, but not why. Where a project was refused we say so and name the authority; for the reasons, look up the planning reference on that council's own register. How to check any figure on this page →

Read the full method, including everything we cannot see →

What has Alistair Strathern said about the grid in Parliament? Search Hansard →

See the full league table Data (JSON)