East of England

East Anglia's farmland is about as good a physical match for ground-mounted solar as UK land gets. It offers large, flat, well-drained arable blocks. There are none of the terrain complications that push South West or Welsh schemes toward smaller, more fragmented sites.

That's exactly why the region already hosts some of the country's biggest operating solar farms. Some of those schemes are sizeable, built on land that continues to combine grazing with generation.

The Bracks solar farm in East Cambridgeshire is a useful reference point. It shows what a well-designed regional scheme can look like in practice. It's a 30.1MW array that has allowed local farmers to graze sheep on site since 2024.

The scheme also includes hedgerow planting and nest-box provision for birds and bats. That's evidence that a large ground-mount scheme and continued agricultural use aren't mutually exclusive on this kind of land.

The constraint that actually determines viability here is rarely the land itself — it's the grid. Demand for connections from solar and battery-storage developers has outpaced available network capacity across much of East Anglia. That's why National Grid has been consulting on new transmission reinforcement in the region specifically.

For a landowner or developer, an early, honest capacity check matters far more than a late-stage surprise. That surprise might involve reinforcement costs or timelines. Either way, the early check is the single most important step on any East of England scheme.