Solar installations will occupy no more than 0.6% of the United Kingdom’s utilized agricultural land by 2030, according to DESNZ.
The UK ministerial department shared the figure in response to a recent FoI request that asked how much agricultural land will be used for ground-mounted solar projects.
Its response points to the UK government’s solar roadmap, published in June, which set out plans to achieve up to 47 GW of solar by the end of the decade.
DESNZ said the 0.6% figure would only be reached if all new capacity modeled under the roadmap’s high-end policy scenario were to be ground-mounted. It added that the calculation was based on the United Kingdom’s total utilized agricultural land area of 16.8 million hectares.
The FoI request also asked the department to explain its claim that ground-mounted solar would occupy 0.4% of UK land under its high-end policy scenario, up from about 0.1% today.
In response, DESNZ pointed to Annex 1 of the solar roadmap, which says the 0.4% figure would be reached in the “very unlikely scenario” where no progress on rooftop solar is made and all new solar capacity is ground-mounted projects.
The percentage was calculated under the assumption of 4 acres/MW for new projects, based on land area estimates using the government’s Renewable Energy Planning Database alongside data on the United Kingdom’s total land area from the country’s Office of National Statistics.
The United Kingdom added at least 2.5 GW of solar in 2025, according to provisional data. While the country’s largest PV plant to date entered operations in July, 2025 has also been a strong year for distributed solar, with the UK’s annual record for rooftop solar installations broken in November.
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