South Dorset

South Dorset has 73 MW of clean power (all solar) approved and still not built: enough to supply a year's electricity to 27,000 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, £4.1m across the constituency's 44,272 homes. A 60 MW battery was refused planning here in 2024; while discharging it could have supplied about 210,000 homes.

Ranks 95 of 650 for clean power approved and not built.

What is stuck, and why

What else is in the briefing

• All 8 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 South Dorset 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