Ground mounted solar energy plants: predicted land use
Published 23 December 2025
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Reference: EIR2025/16357
Date requested: 20 November 2025
Date responded: 19 December 2025
Request
The FOI request asked for the following information:
DESNZ ministers and spokespeople frequently cite that ground mounted solar energy plants will only take up 0.4% of all UK land according to the governments ‘most ambitious scenarios’. Please can you provide all sources, calculations and workings that show how the government arrived at this figure?
Please can you also provide information on how much agricultural land this is equivalent to as a percentage of UK agricultural land, as most ground mounted solar is sited on farm land?
Response
1. DESNZ ministers and spokespeople frequently cite that ground mounted solar energy plants will only take up 0.4% of all UK land according to the governments ‘most ambitious scenarios’. Please can you provide all sources, calculations and workings that show how the government arrived at this figure?
Detailed calculations were published in Annex 1 of the ‘Solar roadmap’ (PDF, 580 KBs), pages 3 and 4.
2. Please can you also provide information on how much agricultural land this is equivalent to as a percentage of UK agricultural land, as most ground mounted solar is sited on farm land?
If all new capacity modelled under the current policy scenario (high end) in the ‘Solar roadmap’ (source: ‘Solar roadmap’) were to be ground mount, it would occupy no more than 0.6% of the UK’s utilised agricultural land by 2030.
This estimate is based on the methodology outlined in Annex I of the ‘Solar roadmap’ (source: ‘Solar roadmap’) and the total UK utilised agricultural land area of 16.8 million hectares (source: ‘Agricultural Land Use in United Kingdom at 1 June 2024’).