Lagan Valley
Lagan Valley has 76 MW of renewables running, enough for 28,000 homes over a year, and nothing large waiting in the planning queue. 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. Northern Ireland is on the all-Ireland grid, so Britain's grid bottlenecks do not reach bills here in the same way.
Ranks 486 of 650 for clean power approved and not built.
What is stuck, and why
| Project and developer | Tech | Size | Why it is stuck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Battery Storage System Development in LisburnLisburn Energy Limited | Battery | 150 MW | Approved less than a year ago — nothing has happened sinceWho can move it: the developer and the network company · planning ref LA05/2024/0401/F |
| Castor Bay Water Treatment Works, Castor Bay Road - Solar FarmNI Water | Solar | 5 MW1,800 homes | Waiting 19 months for a planning decisionWho can move it: Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Council · planning ref LA08/2025/0042/F |
Compared with its neighbours
| Constituency | Approved, not built | Running | Paid to switch off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lagan Valley | 0.5 MW | 76 MW | not visible |
| South Down | 0.3 MW | 0.2 MW | not visible |
| Strangford | 0.3 MW | 6 MW | not visible |
| Upper Bann | 1.4 MW | 9.8 MW | not visible |
| Belfast South and Mid Down | 0.2 MW | 0 MW | not visible |
| Belfast West | 0 MW | 0 MW | not visible |
Upper Bann next door has 1.4 MW waiting, more than Lagan Valley's 0.5 MW.
The rest of the briefing
- Every approval each project still needs, and which of them the public can see
- What building them would mean here — community payments, business rates and construction work
- Drafted parliamentary questions and letters, filled in with this seat's figures
- 1 story angles for local reporting
- A two-page PDF, and a newsroom edition with the references and who to call
Everything above needs no account, and neither does the full seat page, the method or this constituency's raw data. The account covers the packaged briefing and its PDF, and nothing else.