Market

Big solar's planning pipeline is drying up even as the record-breaking year keeps rolling

Solar Media's mid-year market review finds utility-scale planning submissions down to 4GWp so far in 2026, from 12.5GWp at the same point last year, with average approval times for 5MW-plus projects stretching to an all-time high of 60 weeks.

17 September 2026 · Source: Solar Power Portal (Solar Media Market Research)

This site has spent most of 2026 covering a residential solar market that keeps beating records, most recently the 207,619 installations that already passed 2011's all-time high with a third of the year to run. The utility-scale side of the same industry is telling a nearly opposite story this month. Solar Media's own market research team puts 2026's large-scale planning submissions at 4GWp so far, down from 12.5GWp at the same point in 2025, and pins the gap not on weaker demand but on developers front-loading applications ahead of grid reform deadlines in late 2025 and mid-2026, a surge that borrowed against this year's pipeline rather than reflecting a slowdown in appetite.

The number that matters more than the submissions count is what happens after a project is submitted. Average approval time for projects over 5MW has climbed to an all-time high of 60 weeks, up from 51 weeks in 2025, and rejection rates are holding at 23 to 25 percent. That is a planning system getting slower and more selective at the same time submissions are thinning out, which is not the combination you would expect if the bottleneck were purely a shortage of proposals. Construction itself tells a third story: after a slowdown running July 2025 through April 2026, build activity accelerated sharply in Q3 once developers actually received firm grid connection dates, the same connection-queue reform this site has flagged before as the real constraint sitting upstream of both the planning and construction numbers.

None of this touches a domestic install directly. A homeowner booking a rooftop system is not competing with a 500MW solar farm for a council planning slot. But the two markets share the same grid, and a system where large-scale generation is taking 60 weeks to clear planning while waiting on connection dates that were themselves the bottleneck a year ago is a system under real strain at exactly the moment domestic solar and battery uptake are also compounding. Over 100 utility-scale assets totalling 6.2GW changed hands in M&A activity this year, which reads as investors positioning for a market they expect to tighten further rather than one cooling off. The residential record-breaking headline and the utility-scale planning slowdown are two readings of the same underlying pressure, not two unrelated stories.

Read the original: Solar Power Portal (Solar Media Market Research). Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.

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