Planning

Steeple Renewables solar and battery scheme in Nottinghamshire gets development consent, with the decision letter giving landscape harm 'great negative weight' and still granting it

A second large solar scheme in two days has been consented: about 600MW of export capacity near West Burton, on land that could be more than 90% best and most versatile farmland on a worst-case count, approved on 9 October 2026.

10 October 2026 · Source: Department for Energy Security and Net Zero

On 9 October 2026 the Energy Secretary's decision, signed by the Minister Baroness Curran on her behalf, granted development consent for the Steeple Renewables Project in Nottinghamshire, with modifications to the draft Order. The scheme is a ground-mounted solar farm with an on-site battery energy storage system, described in the decision letter as having a capacity of approximately 600MW of export. The Planning Inspectorate's notice puts it at about 450MW of solar and 150MW of storage. It sits in the Nottinghamshire County Council and Bassetlaw District Council areas and connects by underground cable to the existing National Grid substation at West Burton Power Station. It is a long way from Kent: this is a story about how the national consenting system is behaving, not about anything planned near Sandwich.

The letter is unusually plain about the trade-offs. The principle of the development carries substantial weight in favour, but landscape and visual effects carry great negative weight, and historic environment and land use and soil each carry moderate negative weight. On land, the order limits cover about 888 hectares. The applicant's planning statement reports 72.1% as best and most versatile (BMV) farmland, but the letter notes that the biodiversity mitigation areas were never surveyed and that the survey covered 722 hectares, where 88.68% was BMV. Using Natural England's worst-case assumption for the unsurveyed land, the Secretary of State calculates that more than 90% of the order limits could be BMV, and says that figure is a worst case, not a finding. The letter also says the applicant should have set out those limits during the examination. Even so, the benefits were judged to outweigh the harm.

Two of the decision's own judgments differ from the examining inspectors'. The Secretary of State gave good design neutral weight and declined to require an independent design review panel after consent for the battery compound and substation. She also moved biodiversity from the inspectors' little positive weight to neutral, because of the residual adverse impact on breeding skylark. On climate, the applicant estimates about 174,000 tonnes of CO2e from operation over a 40-year period against about 1,660,000 tonnes avoided compared with grid electricity; those are the applicant's figures, as relayed in the letter. The application was submitted on 14 May 2025, before the 2025 change that raised the solar threshold for this consent route to 100MW, so it was still decided as a nationally significant project.

For households, the practical point is the same as for the Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes scheme consented the day before: large consents are arriving in clusters, and each one makes the case for more storage and a better-used grid. None of this changes what a rooftop system in East Kent earns or costs this winter. The decision can be challenged by judicial review within six weeks of publication, so it is not final until that window has passed.

Read the original: Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.

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